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CONTENTS

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014 FROM THE EDITOR 12 MASTHEAD 14 CONTRIBUTORS 16 LETTERS 18

22 THIS SEASON The most interesting things to see and hear over the next two months, from Rodin’s creative process in Paris to a great Turkish movie

30 INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH How digital techniques are transforming the humanities THE WINE-LIST INSPECTOR Boozing in Beijing FOOD My Madeleine: a bowl of soup in Ghana, by Taiye Selasi

The Kitchen Dialogues: Puy lentils and fillet of beef Lipsmacking: a toasted truffle sandwich in Paris THE BIG QUESTION What’s the best escape? A GAME, A GADGET AND AN APP “Destiny”, and a revolutionary speaker THE MUSIC OF SCIENCE Oliver Morton on engineering the weather READING THE GAME Which is better – baseball or cricket?

30 34 35 36 36 38 41 42 44

126 48 STYLE

JEWELLERY Six gorgeous pieces, six original poems APPLIED FASHION In the realm of the senses THE LINE OF BEAUTY The hood, from fairytales to Valentino NEW BUILT TO LAST A design that has stood the test of time NEW A MATTER OF TASTE Kassia St Clair steers a course through the shops

106 CULTURE

AUTHORS ON MUSEUMS Claire Messud on fine art in Boston AT THE CINEMA Can a film be too beautiful? By Tom Shone BOOKS Notes on a Voice: J.G. Ballard, by Tom Graham

Found in Translation: Geert Mak Six Good Books: Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and more VISUAL CV Timothy Spall, this year’s Best Actor at Cannes

116 PLACES

48 56 58 62 64

106 111 112 112 113 114

MAIN FEATURE The Turks and Caicos: Charles Laurence’s second home GOING NATIVE When in...New Zealand CARTOPHILIA Star trek: the map that makes sense of the universe SEVEN WONDERS Christopher Le Brun, president of the Royal Academy WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE A monkey with a difference in Ethiopia

116 122 124 126 128

BACK PAGE LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND Robert Macfarlane on Jules Verne

130

Swotting all over the world The team from St John’s College, Johannesburg, that represented South Africa in the Kids’ Lit Quiz 2014 in Falmouth, Cornwall Feature, page 66

features 66 the storySellers

A new museum, a global literary quiz and a charity that gets teenagers writing poems: Tim de Lisle tracks three bright ideas to boost literacy

76 HOW TO ERADICATE A DISEASE

Donald Hopkins has already seen off one disease. Now he has another in his sights, and it’s a particularly nasty one. Tom Whipple reports

84 photo essay: SLICES OF LIFE

There’s something special about your first vinyl record. Dean Belcher captures it

96 THE MAKING OF A ROLE

For Eddie Redmayne, playing Stephen Hawking meant two years of graft and spreadsheets. Clemency Burton-Hill follows him through the process

cover photograph ian winstanley

maja daniels

© 2014 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited. Published by The Economist Newspaper Limited, 25 St James’s Street, London, SW1A 1HG, telephone +44 (0)20 7830 7000; e-mail intelligentlife@economist.com; www.moreintelligentlife. com. ISSN 1743-7424. Where opinion is expressed it is that of the author and does not necessarily coincide with the editorial views of the publisher or The Economist. All information in this magazine is verified to the best of the author’s and the publisher’s ability. However, The Economist Newspaper Limited does not accept responsibility for any loss arising from reliance on it. Printed by Wyndeham Group.

PEFC certified This copy of Intelligent Life is printed on paper sourced from sustainably managed forests certified by PEFC www.pefc.org PEFC/16-33-582

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FROM THE EDITOR

Lights, camera, research When you edit a cultural magazine, you have to decide where you stand on actors. There are a lot of them, they are highly recognisable, and many are on offer as interviewees. But the offer often has a Faustian tinge: if you accept, you lose a piece of your magazine’s soul. Not to the actor or actress concerned, who is probably deeply soulful, but to the grim machinery behind them. The interview may be for only an hour, it may be in a hotel, the publicist may be in the room: everything conspiring to deliver a piece of pap. And star power – or pr power – is now such that photo approval, even copy approval, is not uncommon. Our parentage, at the independent-minded Economist Group, means that we couldn’t play that game even if we wanted to. The day after our last issue closed, an e-mail came in from Clemency Burton-Hill, who wrote our cover story on Gustavo Dudamel in 2013. She had embarked on a piece about Eddie Redmayne (page 96). “I realise most actors are far from your Platonic ideal, being pr’d to within an inch of their lives,” she wrote, “but Eddie is a different kettle of fish – clever & thoughtful, and he has had this extraordinary year playing Stephen Hawking for ‘The Theory of Everything’, for which I’ve been quietly observing him at close quarters...” Quietly observing: that sounded like us. Clemency’s piece is not a profile of Redmayne, although you get to know him reasonably well by the end of it: it’s the story of a project. In a telling moment, he talks about being at Cambridge, where he read history of art and used to rub shoulders with the engineering students, whose faculty was next door. Redmayne felt bad because he and his arts mates worked far less than the engineers, yet they would all end up with “a number, a degree”. (The difference comes at the end of the rainbow, where the engineers find a pot of job security.) His own grasp of science, he admits, was faint: he had to have some of Hawking’s theories explained to him as if to a six-year-old. But in the way he applied himself to capturing the remorseless onset of Motor Neurone Disease, he turns out to have been a fine student of biology. “The second a muscle goes,” he says, “it can’t come back again in a different scene. It’s not something the director can fudge in the edit.” By interviewing Redmayne several times, never in a hotel room, let alone with a pr hovering, Burton-Hill gets under the skin of a formidable piece of work. In our other long reads, the two cultures go their separate ways. Good riddance (page 76), by Tom Whipple, is the story of a doctor, Donald Hopkins, who has helped to eradicate one disease and is tanta-

lisingly close to vanquishing another – a particularly nasty one, as you will discover. The storysellers (page 66) is a piece of mine on three projects, two in Britain, one from New Zealand, that foster literacy and creativity. It was prompted by two moments in 2010: a sneak preview of a new museum in Oxford, and a trip to a school quiz in Edinburgh, in which my daughter took part. All three projects are heartening, inspiring and rather under-sung. Perhaps some of those actors’ publicists will see an opportunity to branch out. Our photo essay (page 84), often a set of landscapes, is a set of portraits this time: music-lovers with their first vinyl record, by Dean Belcher. We note that records are like kisses, in that you don’t forget your first. More than that, the memory can make you smile or cringe. Many of Belcher’s subjects stand there with a big smile on their face. My own first record is a cringe: “Long Haired Lover from Liverpool” by Little Jimmy Osmond. I was ten; he was nine. I confessed this in an e-mail to Laura Barton, whose words accompany the pictures. “A very fine choice!” she replied. “Mine was ‘La Bamba’ by Los Lobos, bought at Woolworth’s in Holyhead with a 50p-off voucher from Smash Hits. Rest in peace, some of those things.” The British Society of Magazine Editors’ Awards are coming up. We have a nomination for the magazine as a whole, and one for Columnist of the Year: Robert Macfarlane for Landscapes of the Mind (page 130). You can tell a lot about a magazine by its back page, and Rob has made ours sing with his blend of erudition and warmth – and a helping hand from Su Blackwell, whose paper sculptures, made from the book Rob is writing about, are an unfailing delight. ~ Tim de lisle

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CONTRIBUTORS

LAURA BARTON (Photo Essay, page 84) is a Guardian feature writer and car reviewer. Her first novel is “Twenty-One Locks”.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON (Big Question, page 38) is the author of “Thrive” and founder of the Huffington Post.

ADAM NICOLSON (Big Question, page 38) has written 20 books, including the Samuel Johnson-longlisted “The Mighty Dead”.

ISABEL BEST (Lipsmacking, page 36) writes for Elle and the ft. She lives in Paris.

ALAN JOHNSON (Big Question, page 38) is a Labour mp who has held five cabinet posts. His books are “Please, Mr Postman” and the Orwell prize-winning “This Boy”.

RUTH PADEL (poetry rocks, page 48) is a poet, memoirist and the Royal Opera House’s first writer-in-residence.

CLEMENCY BURTON-HILL (Redmayne, page 96) is a bbc Radio 3 presenter, violinist, actress and writer. Her latest novel is “All the Things You Are”. SWITHUN COOPER (poetry rocks, page 48) has published poems in Poetry London and the Rialto and won an Eric Gregory award. IMTIAZ DHARKER (poetry rocks, page 48) is an artist, film-maker and poet. “Over the Moon” is her latest volume of poetry. ANNE ENRIGHT (Big Question, page 38) is the author of “The Forgotten Waltz” and the Booker prize-winning “The Gathering”. TOM GRAHAM (Notes on a Voice, page 112) is our latest intern. He is reading biomedical sciences at New College, Oxford. DAVID HARSENT (poetry rocks, page 48) is the author of “Fire Songs” and “Night”, which won the Griffin poetry prize. CHRISTOPHER HIRST (Kitchen Dialogues, page 36) is a former Food Writer of the Year and the author of “Love Bites”. JOHN HOOPER (digital humanities, page 30) is The Economist’s Italy correspondent.

Shelf-educated Books by our contributors

LUCY KELLAWAY (Big Question, page 38) is the ft’s management columnist and the author of “In Office Hours”. CHARLES LAURENCE (Caribbean, page 116) is the author of “The Social Agent” and a former correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He divides his time between New York and the Turks and Caicos. KIERAN LONG (Built to Last, page 62) is senior curator of contemporary architecture, design and digital at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. ROBERT MACFARLANE (Landscapes, page 130) teaches English at Cambridge and chaired the 2013 Man Booker prize judges. His books include “The Old Ways”. HENRY MARSH (Big Question, page 38) is a neurosurgeon and the author of “Do No Harm”, which was longlisted for this year’s Samuel Johnson prize. CLAIRE MESSUD (Authors on Museums, page 106) is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Emperor’s Children” and, more recently, “The Woman Upstairs”.

JASPER REES (Visual CV, page 114) is an author and writer for the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and theartsdesk.com. FIONA SAMPSON (poetry rocks, page 48) is professor of poetry at the University of Roehampton and the author of “Coleshill”. TAIYE SELASI (My Madeleine, page 35) is the author of “Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)” and “Ghana Must Go”. TOM SHONE (Cinema, page 111) is a professor of film history at nyu and the author of “Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective”. MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS (poetry rocks, page 48) is a Costa award-winning poet and the author of “Drysalter”. TOM WHIPPLE (eradicating disease, page 76) is the science correspondent of the Times. PAUL WHITFIELD (When In..., page 122) is the co-author of the original edition of “The Rough Guide to New Zealand”. HENRY WISMAYER (Wild Things, page 128) writes for National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast Traveller and Wanderlust.

W W W. ZENITH-WATCHES .COM | W W W. ROLLINGSTONES .COM

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LETTERS

CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? Re: The kilogram (Intelligence, September/October) Tom Whipple’s report on the demise of the physical kilogram reminded me of the weeks leading up to the new millennium. Media hype was fuelling public fear about the “y2k crisis” and I was on assignment in Canada to assess how it might impact the National Research Council’s laboratories. An nrc director assured me that the press had it wrong; the computer glitches had been fixed long ago. But nrc scientists at the Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa were far less relaxed. In winter, temperatures can plummet to -45°C and they feared for the heating systems. In the vault containing the Canadian kilogram, a drop of one or two degrees might cause it to lose enough “weight” to disqualify it from the global system of official measures. If that was the nrc’s biggest worry, I felt Canada could weather y2k quite comfortably. MARILYN SMITH, PARIS

A good man to hand Re: Jean of Ark (Features, July/August) Maggie Fergusson’s article about Jean Vanier moved me for two reasons. First, it highlighted how Christianity – the genuine kind, not the indoctrinated sort – can be turned to the service of mankind. To read this gives me hope. Second, it reminded me of the day I held the hand of Jean Vanier. He had come to meet the residents of AlKafaát, the mission set up by my father to care for those with disabilities. This was during the darkest years of the war in Lebanon. My father and Jean were worlds apart, but their faith in man was the same. In the company of the most “marginal” members of society, the people afflicted with the severest of disabilities, they both found God. And so did I. MYRIAM SHWAYRI, BEIRUT

where to be with the ball, without the ball and in relation to others on the pitch. They were much better “interpreters of space”. RICHARD VAUGHTON, FRANCE

The big omission Re: The Big Question (Intelligence, September/October)

Space cadets Re: Reading the Game (Intelligence, September/October) In the 1970s I coached an under-19s football team in Lancashire. Most of the squad was made up of a-level students, but some of the players had left school when they turned 16. Many of the latter were so good, they were attached to pro clubs. But it was noticeable that the more students I played, the more successful the team. The students had less technical ability, but they better understood the requirements of team play; they knew

The range of views aired in “What’s the point?” was curiously incomplete. Why wasn’t a religious perspective included? Today it’s accepted that faith is foolish. But over millennia, countless individuals have found a raison d’etre through religion. These people built empires, discovered gravity, painted masterpieces. Were they fools?

HAVE YOUR SAY E-mail us at intelligentlife@economist.com or post a letter to The Editor Intelligent Life 25 St James’s Street London SW1A 1HG Please include your name, location and e-mail address. Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity.

THE POINT OF LIFE IS...CONSCIOUSNESS What’s the point? It might be the biggest question of them all. Puzzled over with a furrowed brow or flung out with an expletive, it’s also one of the most flighty. We challenged seven writers to pin it down and explain the meaning of life, and then THE BIG QUESTION invited readers to vote for the best answer in our online poll. For Philip Pullman, the purpose of life is consciousness; the more of it we have, “the better we’re able to understand, create and be kind”. He won the day with 29% of the vote. The Economist’s obituarist Ann Wroe was more succinct, saying, simply, “The point is love”: her share of the vote (23%) far outstripped her word count. The novelist Yiyun Li drew on Seneca and Charlie Brown to make the case for living in the moment, and came in third with 11%. The philosopher Mary Midgley persuaded 7% of the voters that not only does life have a point (take that, Richard Dawkins), it consists in seeking “a larger perspective”. Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker writer, and John Burnside, the poet, tied at 6%. For him, imagination creates meaning; for her, the point is to pass on our genes. Some 4% sided with Stephen Grosz, the psychoanalyst, who felt that the point was to alleviate suffering. Many readers contributed their own views (see “The big omission”, above). But one wrote “All of the above”. Point taken. ~ CHARLIE McCANN The next Big Question What’s the best escape? Page 38

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

THIS SEASON

Exhibitions

Rodin in his lab, facing both ways

Le Baiser (marbre) dans l’atelier du Dépôt des marbres / photographe: Eugène Druet, V&A

Rodin’s figures have a restless energy. Lean, long-limbed, they stretch and slump, curl and clinch. Unlike that of his friend Monet, his rise to fame was a slow burn. It took critics years to give him the recognition he deserved and he still splits the crowd today. Is it because he is a tricky artist to pigeonhole? Rodin was both a champion of modern art and a by-product of the late Romantics. He looked behind him for inspiration. He was fascinated by ancient Greek mythology and spent long periods obsessing over literary epics such as Dante’s “Inferno” and Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”. But he looked forward too, rebelling against traditional methods, finding new ways to work that blazed the trail for modern sculpture. His work is not about familiar iconography or textbook perfection, but a strong desire to capture the inner truths and troubles of the human soul. His world runs on passion and turmoil. “The Laboratory of Creation”, the Musée Rodin’s final show this year, is an unusual one. With hardly any finished bronzes

Exhibitions AT A GLANCE Allen Jones (Royal Academy, London, Nov 13th to Jan 25th). The RA continues its knack for finding well-known artists who have never had a British retrospective. Allen Jones’s pop art is full of colour and irony, and his drawings are worth a closer look. Pop to Popism (Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Nov 1st to Mar 1st). A chance to see some of Australia’s finest pop artists alongside the usual suspects. Look out for “The American Dream” by Brett Whiteley – at 22 metres long, it’s hard to miss. Drawn by Light: The Royal Photographic Society Collection (Science Museum, London, Dec 2nd to Mar 1st). A dive into the archives of the world’s oldest photographic society, from William Henry Fox Talbot to Martin Parr – plus a range of gadgets including Nicéphore Niépce’s heliograph. Love is Enough: William Morris and Andy Warhol (Modern Art Oxford, Dec 6th to March 8th). Guest-curated by the 2004 Turner prize-winner, Jeremy Deller, who puts Morris and Warhol head to head. Soul

on display, “we’re focusing on the things we don’t usually show – the different steps and studies, the sketches before the masterpiece,” says Hélène Marraud, co-curator of the exhibition. Here, the weight will fall on Rodin’s plaster and terracotta casts: a huge collection that will be shown alongside his drawings. Irregular, rough and smothered in fingerprints, the casts offer a glimpse into Rodin’s creative process. Less polished than his bronzes, they have an expressive power that is authentic and undiluted, and shows Rodin at his best. Look at “Meditation”, 1896. The female figure is hunched; she meanders left, then right, and the surface is covered in pits and pocks. The details are unrefined, but Rodin has captured the true spirit and sensuality of his model. He has given her an emotional intensity that is both tender and authoritative, full of grace and full of strength. I’m booking my ticket now. ~ OLIVIA WEINBERG Rodin: The Laboratory of Creation Musée Rodin, Paris, Nov 13th to Sept 27th 2015

mates or a relationship doomed from the start? You decide. Francis Bacon: The Process of Creation (Hermitage, St Petersburg, Dec 7th to March 8th). A dense but focused show that positions Bacon alongside his influences: Rembrandt, Titian, Van Gogh, Picasso. It goes to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich next year. Small Stories: At home in a dolls’ house (V&A Museum of Childhood, London, Dec 13th to Sept 6th). Funny little figures, lovably dated wallpaper: it’s hard to resist a dolls’ house. Here are 12 spanning 300 years, including a kitsch “Kaleidoscope House” by Laurie Simmons. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (National Gallery, Prague, Nov 21st to Feb 1st). Piranesi was one of the great printmakers. His imaginary prisons and ancient ruins inspired everyone from Coleridge to Victor Hugo. Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (LACMA, LA, Nov 16th to Feb 15th). A whole exhibition about one painting, from 1826. Packed with history, it depicts Greece as a young woman with fiery eyes and a troubled gaze. ~ OW

THIS SEASON

Theatre

Mr Norris changes jobs Rufus Norris, who takes over as artistic director of the National Theatre in London next April, was nearly an actor. Nearly a successful actor, in fact: he trained at rada, and has the kind of lowering good looks – Mr Rochester by way of Easter Island – that would have guaranteed him at least a few interesting auditions. But in his early days hanging out at Arts Threshold, a fringe theatre in west London, he was told he was “too gobby” to be an actor, and so he switched to running the show instead – a change of pace for which we should be grateful. In person he’s restrained, thoughtful, ever so slightly intimidating. And his shows reflect a similar, serious intellectual engagement – he has said, with some moral urgency, that his job is “telling stories, and getting at the truth”. Yet, like his slightly younger contemporary Rupert Goold (42 to Norris’s 49), he is a highly theatrical theatre director: his productions are multi-layered, exuberant, brimming with visual inventiveness. The difference is that Goold’s inventiveness sometimes seems to run riot for its own sake; Norris’s serves the show. There have been several notable high points in a career with almost as many peaks as the Himalayas: a stripped-back, pulsating staging of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 Dogme film “Festen” for the Almeida in 2004; a joyful, playful adaptation of DBC Pierre’s novel “Vernon God Little” for the Young Vic in 2007; and “London Road” at the National in 2011, which dealt with the Ipswich murders and singlehandedly created a new form – the verbatim musical. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”, David Hare’s adaptation of Katherine Boo’s award-winning non-fiction narrative about slum-dwellers in Mumbai, seems right up his street: rich with life and voices of all kinds, ranging far beyond the fourth wall, telling a story people need to hear. It opens at the National shortly, and as a statement of intent for the Norris regime, it’s a good omen. ~ ISABEL LLOYD Behind the Beautiful Forevers Olivier, London, Nov 10th to Jan 14th

The Guardian

Theatre AT A GLANCE Golem (Young Vic, London, Dec 9th to Jan 17th). The animationand-live-theatre specialists 1927 return to London with a new show, a modern take on the Jewish monster myth that should play strongly to their aesthetic – part Terry Gilliam, part Fritz Lang. Another Place (Theatre Royal, Plymouth, Nov 6th-22nd). A new play from D.C. Moore exploring man’s obsession with wanting to be elsewhere – in this case outer space. No cast yet, but the Theatre Royal has produced a string of excellent shows lately, including Edward Petherbridge in “My Perfect Mind” (touring until Nov 21st). Constellations (Samuel J. Friedman, New York, from Dec 16th). Lucky New York, part one: Nick Payne’s sharply etched, deeply affecting two-hander about memory and loss was one of the standouts of the Royal Court’s 2012 season. Its Broadway premiere has Jake Gyllenhaal as the alternatively hapless and hopeful hero. A Particle of Dread (Alice Griffin, New York, from Nov 11th). Lucky New York, part two: Stephen Rae and Lloyd Hutchinson reprise their roles in this Sam Shepard reworking of “Oedipus Rex”, first seen – and praised – at last year’s Derry/ Londonderry City of Culture. Assassins (Menier, London, Nov 21st to Mar 7th). Jamie Lloyd continues his bid to have a show playing in every postcode in London. The comedy-heavy casting – Catherine Tate, Mike McShane, Andy Nyman – says he’ll be pointing up the satire in Sondheim’s killer musical. Swallows and Amazons (Old Vic, Bristol, Nov 27th to Jan 17th). A welcome revival of Tom Morris’s sophisticated, energetic adaptation of the Arthur Ransome novels: aside from Bryony Lavery’s reboot of “Treasure Island” at the National, if you want to avoid trad panto, this is the best bet for children this winter. ~ Il

THIS SEASON

Classical

Good reverberations At 56 going on 26, the Finnish conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen continues to make waves. His concern for the environment manifests itself every year in his Baltic Sea festival, and his determination to embrace technological advances keeps finding new and original outlets. Last year the interactive classical-music app he co-created won a Royal Philharmonic Society award for reaching new audiences, and this year he has been part of a commercial advertising campaign to promote classical music along with Apple’s iPad Air. He’s still doing his bit as a cheerleader for more conventional events, though always with an invigorating twist. The concert series he’s launching at the Southbank is a case in point. Entitled “City of Light: Paris 1900-1950”, it draws in two of the most versatile pianists in the game – Mitsuko Uchida and Pierre-Laurent Aimard – and one of the most flamboyantly brilliant sopranos, Barbara Hannigan. Starting with Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and moving on via Stravinsky and Ravel to Messiaen’s “Turangalila”, these concerts reflect a musical revolution which, in Salonen’s view, is still reverberating today. ~ Michael Church City of Light: Paris 1900-1950 Southbank Centre, from Nov 27th

Talks

To Vancouver with love Vancouver in the fall means sunglasses and umbrellas – you either get gilded autumn colours, or you get soaked. But for six days in October the Vancouver Writers Fest offers an excuse to take cover, while listening to authors from across Canada and beyond: this year’s crop includes James Ellroy, Tim Winton, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Eimear McBride (left). The venue is Granville Island, actually a peninsula, an industrial wasteland now transformed into a waterfront haven for lovers of the arts and esoteric food. The Fest offers some enticing combinations in its biggest programme to date: Emma Donoghue with Sarah Waters; Esther Freud and Herman Koch with Christos Tsiolkas. Two popular regular features are the Sunday Brunch (readings, croissants, Buck’s Fizz) and the Literary Cabaret, in which six authors perform and a band tailors music to their texts. The “Fitting Finale” lives up to its name, pairing the intense but twinkling Colm Tóibín and the quietly mischievous Jane Smiley. ~ anthony gardner Vancouver Writers Fest Oct 21st-26th; writersfest.bc.ca

talks AT A GLANCE Cambridge Literary Festival (Nov 30th). One packed day, with Ali Smith, Marina Warner, John Boyne and Alan Johnson. Sarah Waters, DBC Pierre and Kim Newman (British Library, London, Dec 3rd). Three spookophile novelists discuss Gothic literature. UEA Literary Festival (Norwich, to Nov 26th). Weekly talks featuring Ian McEwan, Jane Smiley, Richard Holmes. Hay Festival Dhaka (Bangla Academy, Nov 20th-22nd). Nadeem Aslam, Romesh Gunesekera and Aamer Hussein are among the writers, graphic artists and activists making Hay in Bangladesh. Richard Ford (Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh, Dec 8th). A titan of contemporary fiction. ~ ag

The Guardian, Arena Pal

CLASSICAL AT A GLANCE The Makropulos Affair (Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, Oct 19th). Nadja Michael is the heroine in a new production by Arpad Schilling, with Pavel Cernoch as Albert Gregor, and Tara Erraught (the centre of a critical row at Glyndebourne) as the bewitching Christa. Carmen (from the Met, New York, Nov 1st). Richard Eyre’s popular production goes to 2,000 theatres in 66 countries. L’elisir d’amore (Royal Opera, London, Nov 18th). A revival of Donizetti’s comic masterpiece with Lucy Crowe, Bryn Terfel and the new tenor sensation Vittorio Grigolo. But the biggest draw is Laurent Pelly’s charming off-the-wall production. Les Arts Florissants (Cité de la musique, Paris, Nov 21st-22nd). William Christie’s superb ensemble mark 250 years since Jean-Philippe Rameau’s death with rare airings of two of his Fontainebleau divertissements. The Gospel According to the Other Mary (ENO, London, Nov 21st). Peter Sellars premieres John Adams’s latest opera – “an extraordinary work”, says the New York Times. ~ mc

M ESUR E ET D Ă&#x2030;MESUR E *

TONDA 1950

Rose gold Ultra-thin automatic movement HermĂ¨s alligator strap Made in Switzerland

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THIS SEASON

ROCK AT A GLANCE David Bowie (album, Nov 17th). This should be the best Bowie compilation since the cool calm clarity of “ChangesOneBowie” . Drily entitled “Nothing Has Changed”, it comes in three versions: a triple CD, in reverse chronological order; a double CD, in chronological order; and a double LP, all shook up. All three include one new song, “Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)”. Bryan Ferry (album, Nov 17th). Bowie and Ferry on the same day: is this 1973 all over again? After “The Jazz Age”, Ferry strolls back to the present. Or perhaps the more recent past – his title, “Avonmore”, clearly summons the ghost of “Avalon”. Stevie Wonder (N. American tour, Nov 6th to Dec 5th). Lately he has had more misses than hits, but this could be fabulous: the classic album “Songs in the Key of Life”, in full, featuring “As”, “I Wish” and the king of all, “Sir Duke”. ~ tim de lisle

ROCK

Dancing his way out of obscurity This has been Future Islands’ year. Just before the release of their fourth album “Singles” in March, they performed on the “Late Show with David Letterman”. By September, Samuel T. Herring’s impassioned performance of a pulsating synth ode to waning love called “Seasons (Waiting On You)” had been viewed 2.5m times on YouTube. Instantly, Future Islands were dragged from dive-bar obscurity into the powerful currents of the mainstream. While plenty of bands might have burned up in the mania of media sensationalism, here was one that had been honing a style for nigh on ten years by the time they were caught in the lights. To see them in concert is to know this. Herring’s moves fall somewhere between Morrissey and a Butlins Redcoat: muscular, limber-limbed, with a pantomime intensity that makes it hard to look anywhere else. His bassist, William Cashion, maintains a thousand-yard stare that is comic by comparison. Together with a keyboard player and a touring drummer, they put on a show worth a hundred Letterman slots. It draws heavily on Future Islands’ earlier, dancier material, giving Herring ammunition for routines that inspire feverish dancing on the floor. A reminder that, while it may take years to learn how to manhandle the mood of a crowd, in 2014 it only takes one four-minute clip to change the course of a career overnight. ~ HAZEL SHEFFIELD Singles out now. Future Islands on tour Europe, Oct 3rd to Nov 8th; LA, Nov 20th

All songs at iTunes and Spotify (search IntLifeMag)

Jeffrey R. Staab

iNTELLIGENT TUNES: SIX GOOD SONGS TO SLIP INTO YOUR POCKET Jamie T: Zombie. Ed Sheeran for grown-ups. Or, if you prefer, Joe Strummer for the young. Leonard Cohen: A Street. One of six gems on “Popular Problems”, the best album ever by an octogenarian. U2: Every Breaking Wave. Never mind that intrusive iTunes giveaway, here’s what they do best: rock with soul. Robert Plant: A Stolen Kiss. From an album full of hefty riffs, a moment of beautiful restraint. Jessie Ware: Pieces. After making it mediumsized in 2012 with her crisp electro-soul, Ware now has the lungs and lustre of a star. ~ tDl

FILM

To sleep, perchance to dream, in Turkey When you watch a Nuri Bilge Ceylan film, you’re transported to a distant land. In literal terms, that land encompasses the windswept steppes and looming mountains of the Turkish countryside, territory which this writer-director made his own in his hugely acclaimed, hypnotic crime odyssey, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”. It’s a terrain of wild horses and humanoid rock formations – a fantastic setting which could double as an alien planet or an elvish kingdom without any assistance from cgi. But Ceylan’s Anatolia isn’t just defined by its geographical wonders. Its dreamlike atmosphere is even more distinctive. His new film, “Winter Sleep”, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. It’s a Chekhovian drama, partly based on Chekhov’s short stories

FILM AT A GLANCE Interstellar (Nov 7th). Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” attracted Kubrick comparisons by the dozen. There’ll be dozens more when he sends Matthew McConaughey to the other side of the universe. Life Itself (Nov 14th). Despite their invaluable contribution to society, film critics aren’t often internationally loved Pulitzer prize-winners. The late Roger Ebert was. “Life Itself”, a documentary adapted from his autobiography, conveys the humanity, erudition, pointed humour and joie de vivre which some film critics may lack.

The Drop (Nov 14th). Tom Hardy pours the drinks in a Brooklyn “drop bar” where ill-gotten gains are stashed. Scripted by Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), this downbeat gangland drama is a chance to raise a glass to Hardy’s co-star, James Gandolfini, who gives a fine final performance. The Imitation Game (Nov 14th). This classy biopic can’t quite solve the enigma of Alan Turing, but Benedict Cumberbatch (right) excels as yet another of his buttoned-up, socially inept geniuses, and he gets Best-ofBritish support from Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode,

and revolving around a complacent hotelier (Haluk Bilginer), his bitter sister (Demet Akbag), and his frustrated, much younger wife (Melisa Sözen; exquisitely nuanced performances, all). Their cave-like hotel seems to be a cosily beautiful haven, but when the tourist season ends, and there are fewer guests to distract them, they start to feel trapped in an exasperating limbo, somewhere between the 21st century and the Middle Ages. Whatever they do, mysteries aren’t quite solved, logic doesn’t quite apply, and philosophical conversations spiral and swirl, without ever reaching a conclusion. Pay them a visit for 200 minutes, and the rest of the world will seem far away. ~ nicholas barber Winter Sleep opens in Britain Nov 21st

Rory Kinnear and Mark Strong. What We Do in the Shadows (Nov 21st). Jemaine Clement, the bespectacled half of Flight of the Conchords, co-writes and stars in the year’s funniest film, a mock-doc about a group of diffident vampires sharing a house in New Zealand. It’s the “Spinal Tap” of horror movies. Exodus: Gods and Kings (Dec 26th). Ridley Scott breaks out the swords and sandals again, which might just mean a return to “Gladiator” form. Moses and Rhamses are played by the controversially un-Egyptian Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton. ~ NB

Rewriting history Received wisdom on the Grand Tour in 18th-century Europe is being transformed by 21st-century techniques in California. John Hooper meets the academics who are leading the way In the centre of Stanford University’s sprawling campus stands an impressive clock tower. Through glass at the base you can admire its complex, early20th-century mechanism and read the time from a little clock face that replicates the bigger one above. Next to it, someone has thought to place an even smaller, digital clock. So people know the real time. Stanford, the university that gave birth to Silicon Valley, is probably the world’s least analogue seat of learning. Hewlett-Packard, Google, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, PayPal, Sun Microsystems and Instagram were all founded by its alumni. So it is not surprising that Stanford should also be at the heart of a movement that has swept across campuses in recent years with the speed – and, some would say, the destructiveness – of the forest fires that break out in the hills above the Santa Clara valley. Digital humanities, still relatively little-known beyond academia, involves using information technology to study the arts and social sciences. Depending on how you define it, the term can encompass anything from building a computer-generated, threedimensional representation of an ancient Sumerian city to feeding thousands of 19th-century novels through software to count the number of words for moral qualities and then sort them by author, date or whatever criteria you choose to put in. Visualising the results of the analysis on, say, an interactive chart or map, is crucial to most digitalhumanities projects: it can enable researchers to draw at a glance conclusions that would otherwise lie unnoticed in a morass of facts and figures. “It’s wonderful to have the data at your fingertips, to bounce the facts around in a way that would be impossible without computers,” says Giovanna Ceserani. Over lunch in the Stanford Faculty Club, she produces a laptop to explain what she means. Ceserani is studying the 18th-century Grand Tour. Her database is John Ingamells’s “Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers to Italy, 1701-1800”, a storehouse of information on more than 5,000 men and women who journeyed through Italy in search of education, inspiration or, sometimes, just entertainment. Ceserani has narrowed her gaze to the 69 who became architects.

“Even so,” she says, “it is impossible to remember all that is known about all of them.” Tapping on the keyboard, Ceserani summons up a bar chart. Beside the vertical axis are the names of her subjects. The horizontal axis measures the number of months they spent in Italy. Multi-coloured bars stretching from left to right show where they stayed, each separate colour corresponding to a town or city. One colour predominates: red, for Rome. That of itself is no surprise. The ruins of the old imperial city were the high point of the Grand Tour. But when Ceserani ran the same exercise for the aristocrats with an interest in architecture, she discovered something that would never have struck her just reading through the entries in Ingamells’s monumental directory. “The amateurs, like Lord Burlington,” she says, “went as much to Venice or Naples as they did to Rome.” The data, when visualised, showed that a long stint in Rome was a kind of litmus test: “It almost defined what being an architect in the 18th century was all about.” Prompted by what she had seen in the bar chart, Ceserani began looking again at the architects’ relationship with Rome. What she found using conventional research techniques was that “it was not just about looking at great old buildings. Rome was a unique place where you could interact with people from other countries and social classes, sometimes gaining patronage in the process.” And not only that: Ceserani’s non-digital studies showed that the aspiring British and Irish architects were far more engaged with their Italian contemporaries than had been realised. They studied under masters like the great engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi; they tried to join Italian architectural societies and win Italian architectural competitions. “When the Architects’ Club, England’s first architectural association, was founded in 1791,” Ceserani says, “one of the four requirements was to belong to an Italian academy.” Her project is an example of the way digital humanities should work. Prompted by an original view of data that had long since been available, she formed a hypothesis that inspired her to look at the literature in a new light. In this case, the hypothesis

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RESEARCH

is one that challenges the view of the Grand Tour as a jaunt for dilettantes. For architects at least, says Ceserani, “it was where professionalisation took place.” With its palm trees, courtyards and artificially weathered sandstone masonry topped with red tiles, much of Stanford looks the way a Moorish palace might do in a video game. On the top floor of a building in this distinctive, Beau-Geste-on-the-West-Coast style is the Centre for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or cesta, the inter-departmental unit that is digital humanities’ most important bridgehead on campus. Ask Mark Algee-Hewitt, a lecturer from the English faculty, whether cesta could fairly be described as the epicentre of the worldwide digital humanities movement, and he replies with a smile and a “we like to think so.” Behind him is an array of filing cabinets

marked “Chinese Railroad Workers”. More than 10,000 Chinese toiled to build America’s first transcontinental railway, many of them in the employ of Leland Stanford, the founder of the university that bears his name. The mostly illiterate Chinese left behind little by way of diaries or memoirs. But one use of digital humanities can be to fill in the void where no written accounts exist. cesta’s researchers are mining corporate and other records to build up a picture of the lives of the Chinese who helped to unite America. In some cases, the work carried out at cesta merely confirms what might have been assumed. Was it really worth running large numbers of texts through computers to show that the term “United States” was more often followed by a verb in the plural (“the United States are...”) before the civil war than after it? In other cases, however, digital research can yield >

When in Rome... ...do as the techies do: the Piazza Navona (1756) by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, with a modern twist

> evidence that undermines, or even destroys, accepted

Untold stories Chinese labourers building the Northern Pacific Railroad in Western Montana in the 1870s, employed by Leland Stanford, who also founded the university

theories and common assumptions. cesta’s biggest project is Mapping the Republic of Letters, a catch-all title for a series of studies, including Ceserani’s, that aim to shed light on the internet of the Enlightenment: the network of correspondence that linked intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries. “We’re like the nsa,” says Dan Edelstein, a professor of French. “We look at who wrote to whom, when and where.” An obvious target for this form of surveillance was Voltaire. Among his many contributions to the Enlightenment was his “Lettres Philosophiques”, published in 1734, which he claimed introduced Locke to a French readership. Voltaire had lived in Britain for three years and spoke English. So when Edelstein first looked at the visualisation of his correspondence, “what jumped out at me was that Voltaire wrote so little to Britain. There were only 140 letters out of a total of around 15,000 – less than 1%.” Edelstein went back to examining Voltaire’s correspondence and realised for the first time the rel-

evance of his subject’s attachment to the notion of translatio studii – the idea that the centre of civilisation moves inexorably from place to place. “Essentially, Voltaire thought England had had its moment in the historical sun,” says Edelstein, who based a research paper on his findings. Caroline Winterer, a professor of history and director of the Stanford Humanities Centre, had a similar eureka moment when she saw a map of Voltaire’s correspondence set alongside that of her main subject, Benjamin Franklin (engraving, right). “With Franklin what you get is a dense transatlantic network,” she says, “whereas with Voltaire there is just one letter that crosses the Atlantic.” That seemed to justify Franklin’s fame as a cosmopolite. But when Winterer dug deeper into the data there was another surprise waiting: “most of his correspondents were either British or American.” This is a recurrent theme in the Republic of Letters project. The networks of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment were far more restricted than the academics had imagined. Paula Findlen, a professor of Italian history, says the same was true of Galileo. “We think of him today as perhaps the first scientific celebrity. But he lived in a relatively local world until he was forced not to.” It was only after this great polymath came under the menacing gaze of the Inquisition that he reached out for help to non-Italian intellectuals. “In 1597, Kepler writes to him and sends him one of his books,” Findlen reports. “Galileo responds politely, but no great intellectual camaraderie comes of it. He does not get back to him until 1610, when he has need of him.” “You’re not plugging in data to get answers,” says Winterer, “but to ask better questions.”And some of those questions remain tantalisingly unanswered. A pioneer of digital humanities – and one of its most controversial figures – is to be found in a darkened study, piled high with books, not far from cesta’s headquarters. Franco Moretti, Stanford’s professor of English and Comparative Literature, was drawn into digital humanities by way of cartography. He set out to produce an atlas of the European novel, which was published in Italian in 1997. “I realised that to make good maps you need sets of data,” he says. “That is how I started quantifying.” One of his projects involved analysing all the passages in 19th-century novels that begin 50 words before a place name and end 50 words after it, with the aim of determining the place’s emotional associations. Analysing the results, Moretti noticed something that he had not set out to find: “The growth of fictional London did not match the growth of real London.”

Corbis, AKG

intelligence

The population exploded in the 19th century, growing from 1m to almost 7m. Yet for the most part British authors continued stubbornly to locate the events in their novels in a London that stretched from “somewhere near the Bank of England to Mayfair”. Yet, says Moretti, the same is not true of French authors writing about Paris. Why not? “Is it perhaps that in London the chic areas have not changed?” he asks with a shrug. “I just don’t know.” The person credited with inventing digital humanities was yet another Italian. In 1949, Father Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest who was bent on compiling a concordance of the works of St Thomas Aquinas, persuaded ibm to let him use its punch-card technology, then at the cutting edge. Busa said later that after learning that an in-house report had concluded his project was impossible, he went into a meeting with ibm’s founder, Thomas J. Watson senior, carrying one of the firm’s own posters. It bore the slogan “The difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer”. Watson was won over, but the impos-

Great minds Among those whose letters have been analysed are Benjamin Franklin (holding wreath) and Voltaire (back, third from left). Joseph Louis Masquelier’s 1791 engraving pictures the moment when Mirabeau handed the new French constitution to Rousseau

At Stanford, science students refer to the nonscientists as fuzzies

sible did indeed take longer. The last of the 56 volumes of Busa’s “Index Thomisticus” was published in 1980. By then punch-cards had given way to magnetic tape, which had given way to floppy disks. But it was the advent of the world wide web in 1991 that really enabled digital humanities to take off. For Caroline Winterer, as a university administrator, one of the benefits of digital humanities is that it breaks down barriers between disciplines. These are traditionally formidable at Stanford, where students reading science subjects – techies – refer to their non-scientific fellowundergraduates as fuzzies. “Humanists have always worked alone, like monks in cells,” Winterer says. “Digital humanities involves publishing together and, before that, thinking together. cesta crosses the barrier between techies and fuzzies.” But, for its critics, all this quantifying, this computing and classifying, not only runs counter to the spirit of disciplines that deal in shades of meaning, but could give students the idea that they no longer need to read, see and listen. Caroline Winterer says she understands the concerns. “Some of the values that we try to cultivate are taste, discrimination and aesthetic appreciation, and those are not obvious targets for digital humanities. There is no substitute for the kind of deep knowledge that only long-term immersion can bring. Digital humanities can enhance that, but not replace it. People still need to read books, look at pictures and listen to music.” Franco Moretti, who coined the term “distant reading” to describe the computer analysis of literary works, is public enemy number one for the traditionalists. His “penchant for playing devil’s advocate”, one critic argued, “has brought him as close to notorious stardom as his discipline allows.” This affable Italian clearly takes a mischievous delight in provoking outrage, coming out with remarks such as: “There is no continuity between reading and knowing.” Some of the experiments planned under his overall direction in cesta’s Literary Lab are enough to prompt a shudder of apprehension in the least technophobic of bookworms. One of them aims to establish >

Tim Atkin The Wine-List Inspector

At a former television factory in Beijing, you’ll find wine that deserves an Emmy > whether there is something linguistic that excites sus-

pense in readers. “We’re talking to social psychology about it,” says Algee-Hewitt in a matter-of-fact way. The project would involve volunteers, he says. “We want to hook them up to machines like lie detectors, to see if their heart rates change in response to certain words and phrases.” Might that not be the first step on a road that could one day lead to the formulation of an algorithm for the writing of the perfect, definitive – and last ever – suspense novel? “It’s never that easy,” Algee-Hewitt retorts. “I doubt we’ll ever – I hope we’ll never – reach that point.” Like Moretti, he insists that, within the rapidly evolving world of digital humanities, Stanford is a bastion of moderation: that those who teach the technique on campus accept that quantitative analysis has to go hand in hand with traditional methods. “Some of the younger people are tempted by the strength and purity of numbers to think that formal methods should just be forgotten,” Moretti says. “I think that is a mistake.” Put to him the view that his methods could deter people from reading, and he replies with a question: “Have you visited the Stanford Bookstore?” I had, and it had been a sobering experience: the huge window display running the width of the store – packed with cards, mugs and sweatshirts – found room for only 12 books. Half of them were frivolous. Of the other six, one was “Are you Smart Enough to Work at Google?” Inside, books occupied less than half the floor space. The section on Japanese history – a subject of no small importance to a Pacific coast university, you might think – offered only seven titles. At the campus Starbucks, 17 students were using laptops, and one was reading a book. Stanford provides a glimpse of an almost book-less future. “I am the only member of my family who still reads books,” says Moretti glumly. From the vantage point of Silicon Valley, digital humanities can be seen, not as an attack on the arts and social sciences, but a pre-emptive rescue: a way of making them attractive and comprehensible to a generation brought up on Facebook and Twitter. What none of those involved in digital humanities disputes is that the discipline is in its infancy. As the software for interrogating data becomes more widely available, as libraries and archives digitise more of the books and manuscripts in their possession and make the texts available to scrutiny by outsiders, the possibilities for quantitative investigation will increase exponentially. With a metaphor of which any man of letters would approve, Franco Moretti says: “This is just the first chapter.” ■

It’s not easy being a wine lover in Beijing. You’d expect this thrusting capital to be full of vinous delights, especially at a time when China is supposed to be enjoying a wine boom. But beer and baijiu, the local grainbased spirit, are both much more popular, and most restaurants serving Chinese cuisine don’t take wine seriously. If you want to drink decent wine, opt for Western menus. The best of these (and the one with the most interesting wine list) is at Temple Restaurant, widely known as TRB. Located in the old Dongcheng district, close to the Forbidden City, it’s housed in a former black-andwhite-television factory. Yet there’s nothing monochrome about the food. The four-course tasting menu we enjoyed – with two choices per course, for 458 yuan (€58) – was French-inspired, but not afraid to include coconut curry, bok choy or Beijing camembert. The owner, Ignace Leclair, is a Belgian who knows his wines. His extensive, well-chosen list features selections from more than a dozen countries, including China. Given that locals make up 75% of TRB’s clientele, this may seem a politic move, but apparently it’s the foreigners who tend to order the Chinese wines.

The list, like the food, focuses on France, particularly the classic regions of Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and the Rhône, but there is an eclectic line-up from other regions and countries, too, many of them made using organic or biodynamic methods. The tasting menu comes with the option of four different glasses for an extra 268 yuan, all of them European (presumably because there are only seven Chinese wines on a list of more than 400), but as there was such an intriguing range from farther afield we ordered by the bottle instead. Our table ordered several different dishes, so I picked two versatile, unoaked wines. From Spain, the 2012 Terras Gauda O’Rosal, Rías Baixas (488 yuan) was a crisp, focused, stony white that was the perfect foil for the seafood starters, while the Sicilian 2012 Arianna Occhipinti Tami Frappato (380 yuan) was the sort of chilled, juicy, refreshing red that worked equally well with riceflake crusted lobster and duck confit. And the Beijing camembert? Monsieur Leclair suggested a savoury, bone-dry, umami-rich González Byass Leonor 12 Años Palo Cortado Sherry. The match, like everything else at TRB, was spot on. trb-cn.com; 726 yuan pp, including wine

Where else to go and what to drink ARIA At the China World hotel, an awardwinning, high-end list to complement food from the Australian chef Phillip Taylor. Around 600 yuan pp Best white: 2012 Neil Ellis Groenekloof Sauvignon Blanc South Africa has made enormous strides with the Sauvignon grape thanks to the development of cool-climate areas such as Groenekloof. New Zealand Sauvignon meets Sancerre. 350 yuan Best red: 2010 J. Palacios Pétalos, Bierzo A delicious example of Spain’s indigenous Mencia, grown in the hills of Bierzo. A rich yet refreshing red with notes of plum and green pepper, and a touch of oak sweetness. 700 yuan shangri-la.com/beijing/chinaworld

ILLUSTRATION CHRIS PRICE

HERITAGE A recently updated, cosmopolitan wine list matches the classic French cuisine at the Sofitel Wanda hotel. Around 400 yuan pp Best white: 2011 Howard Park Riesling, Great Southern A bone-dry Riesling from Western Australia. On the cusp of developing some bottle-aged characters, but it’s also brimming with limey zip and acidity. 490 yuan Best red: 2010 Craggy Range Sophia, Hawke’s Bay A delicious, finely wrought Bordeaux blend that deserves the same accolades as the better-known Craggy Range Syrah. Subtle notes of red berries and graphite, and well integrated oak. 900 yuan sofitel.com

INTELLIGENCE

MY MADELEINE

The loving spoonful As a pleased-with-herself graduate, Taiye Selasi thought she knew it all. But Ghana, and a bowl of soup, taught her otherwise In 2001, over the course of the summer, my godmother taught me to cook. I’d just graduated phi beta kappa from Yale. My mother was thrilled. My godmother, less. My education, however prestigious, was patently incomplete. I could write in Yoruba, translate Latin, pick a horse hoof, play piano, spot a Botticelli – but, for shame, I couldn’t cook. The solution was simple: I would go to Ghana for a culinary apprenticeship, living in my godmother’s house while studying in her kitchen. My godmother, like my mother, is an extraordinary cook. One of those rare human beings who, in the words of a friend, “seem to put air” into food. I’d long since marvelled at the magic she produced out of Ghana’s culinary canon, transforming into gourmet meals the fare of farmers and fishermen. There was her famously velvety garden-egg soup – an eggplant dish like caponata; her gingery “red-red”, a tomatobased stew of onions and black-eyed peas; her palava sauce, a delicious mix of leafy greens and fresh smoked fish; but above all there was her groundnut soup, that creamy dream of a stew. Groundnut soup is held to be a national dish of Ghana, though our Senegalese neighbours claim the same of mafé, an identical stew. The titular groundnuts – what Americans call peanuts – are roasted and ground into butter, then blended with the standard west African tomato-and-onion base. It was an ambitious dish with which to start my course in domestication. But my godmother, unlike my mother, is a wonderful teacher. If I’d come to Accra an ignorant cook, I was an educated eater, raised on my mother’s dazzling brand of international cuisine. My mother is the type of cook who never needs a recipe, whose units of measurement are “handful”, “pinch”, and “until it just tastes right”. But between her roles as single mother, doctor and gourmet chef, she simply never had the chance to give lessons. To study under my godmother was another thing entirely, as much to do with being in Ghana as with being instructed. For the groundnut soup we used ripe tomatoes plucked from her lush garden. We bought peanuts from the women who harvested them, grinding them ourselves. We knew the names of the market vendors and chatted with each about what was in season, buying enough to last for

the week. In short, we gave food time. The onions in Ghana, small and red, were incredible to begin with; my godmother’s painstakingly slow sweating method turned them into candy. Blended with fiery Scotch Bonnet peppers, ginger and tomato, the onions gave the groundnut soup a sweetly smoky taste. We let the pot simmer, for eternity it seemed, until oil from the peanut butter rose to the top, breaking out in little puddles like oil spills on a lake. I must have mastered 30 different dishes that one summer. My godmother, having lived across Europe and Africa, cooked everything – and everything well. We made chana masala, Yorkshire pudding, marmalade, ratatouille. But my favourite dish, which became my best, is still her groundnut soup. Learning to cook Ghana’s national dish was an object lesson in Ghanaian living: in seasons, farming, respect for nature, family values, patience. Ten years later when I moved to Rome I’d re-encounter those lessons, discovering a culinary culture very similar to Ghana’s. In Italy people still shop at markets, know their vendors, grow their herbs. And whenever I entertain in Rome I make my favourite soup. The tradition began in September 2012 when a friend and I hosted dinner. As happens on weeknights only in Rome, our guest list numbered 40. I went to Piazza Vittorio to buy the rice and pepper. My friend ground the pounds of peanuts at home. We picked tomatoes from the terrace. The soup was a success; it has become an annual tradition. Every autumn I make a pot, and tell my friends to bring friends. Patiently waiting for the oil to surface, as if the peanut butter were releasing its ghost, I think about my education in my godmother’s kitchen. To cook for others is not, as I thought when I went to her that summer, an exercise in anachronism, in notions of female duty. To cook is to connect. With nature, with land, with history, with culture. With people. This was my godmother’s lesson – indeed, her lasting gift – to me. ■

Street life The author in Ghana, where her godmother taught her to shop locally, and to “put air” into food

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Hirst & Schon The Kitchen Dialogues

A food writer from Yorkshire, a chef from France, a conversation about cooking

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LIPSMACKING

Toasted truffle sandwich Michel Rostang, Paris As the food arrives, all conversation stops. Compared with the precisely assembled amuse-gueules handed to other diners, four triangles of sandwich with a pile of curly endive at their centre hardly look spectacular. But the scent – earthy, organic – is almost overwhelming; enough to stifle the bourgeois lunchtime chatter at Michel Rostang’s restaurant here in the 17th arrondissement. Rostang’s black-truffle sandwich is renowned throughout Paris, the most popular item on his winter truffle menu, yet also the simplest. You could make one at home, but go instead chez Rostang for the care he takes with ingredients. The salted butter is churned to order in Brittany, the sourdough is custommade at Boulangerie Poujauran with a particularly aerated crumb that soaks up fat like a sponge, while the black truffles come direct from a renowned market in Richerenches, Provence. “The chef recommends you eat with your fingers,” commands the priestly, black-clad waiter. I pick up a triangle, golden brown on the outside, slivered with black between. First comes the crunch of toast, steeped in salty hot butter, which through some kind of osmosis has drawn into itself both the tang of sourdough and the perfumed essence of fungi. Then comes the chew of the truffles themselves, surprisingly meek after the buttery fanfare to which they have yielded their souls. And that butter – it doesn’t so much ooze out of the bread’s pores as gush, sliding over my fingers. For €65 you can buy the truffle sandwich as a takeaway, to store in the freezer and toast at home. Apparently one customer buys six at a time. I wonder if they eat them all at once? ~ ISABE L BE ST €98; michelrostang.com

PORTRAITS BY MAJA DANIELS, ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLY EXLEY

“The lentil is one of my favourite pulses,” said massively different – and I try all the time for Arnaud Schon. “Puy lentil hummus is terrific.” My quality. It’s hard to find really good fillet.” second conversation with the freelance French The potato-and-celeriac galette presented chef who cooks at The Economist concerned an less of a problem. “You just grate and mix the two evening meal he made for the magazine’s board of vegetables, squeeze out the water, season and fry directors. It turned out that we were both great in clarified butter, like a rosti. It should be crunchy fans of the Puy lentil. Since I once visited Le on the outside and a little bit mushy inside. Butter Puy-en-Velay, south-west of Lyon, to report on is essential.” these tiny AOC-protected treasures, I was able to I was reminded of the great French chef chip in – or, to be more accurate, show off. Fernand Point, who explained “the secret of good “It’s the volcanic soil that makes them cooking” in a New Yorker article from 1949 as “Du different. You can see the volcanic cones of the beurre, du beurre, du buerre.” But this being 2014, area on the label of Volvic water. It’s ironic, but Arnaud is somewhat more restrained. “The thing Puy farmers are not allowed to water their lentils about butter is it tastes great. Every morning, I – the plants have to fight for nutrition. It’s what have my toast and the butter oozes and smears gives them their flavour.” over my face. It’s fantastic but it’s the only fat I eat “Really?” But Arnaud was keen to get back to all day, more or less.” his starter. “I sautéed them with a mirepoix [finely A week before we met, I mentioned to chopped celery, carrots and onion in the Arnaud that I’d never had apple Charlotte so he proportions 1:1:2] until they were al dente. Puy surprised me with one specially baked for our lentils are different from chat. But, ever the ordinary lentils – they keep perfectionist, he tutted at their shape while cooking.” the result. “It’s not cooked “Yes, did you know that quite enough,” he said, our word ‘lens’ came from peering at the pale brown ‘lentil’?” dome of cooked sliced “Ah. Then I finish them bread with its filling of Puy lentil salad with a light dressing of red sautéed apple. “Coxes are a wine vinegar with salt, bit sweet. I usually use a with red mullet pepper and a little oil. mixture of Bramleys and Vinegar and lentils are a Coxes.” It tasted fine to me; fantastic combination. Try it. but I admitted that I’d made Beef fillet, potatoI had it a lot when I was a my first apple Charlotte child. When I taste it, I’m five only the previous night. It and-celeriac galette years old again.” had the right, dark-brown An amateur chef might colour – or at least, it have the idea of combining matched the photo in the strong, gamey flavour of Arnaud’s battered college Apple Charlotte fried red mullet with earthy textbook, “Travaux lentils but he wouldn’t think Pratiques de Cuisine”. I let of using a ring-mould to slip the secret of my shape the pile of pulses. At accidental success: “I used least this one wouldn’t. And sliced brioche for the crust he wouldn’t dream of sprinkling cubes of acidic – I think the sugar in the loaf caramelised a bit.” Granny Smith apple between the disc of lentils Arnaud instantly saw the possibility. “Yes. It and fillet of mullet. “I discovered a few years ago could be really good, like using panettone in a that raw apple goes so well with fish or shellfish,” bread-and-butter pudding.” Arnaud explained. “God that sounds good. Bread-and-butter The main course prompted an admission. “It’s pudding is my favourite.” the first time I’ve done beef fillet in two years. I’m “I top it with a marmalade glaze. You just not too keen on this piece of meat. It should have brush it over, including the peel, when the great marbling of fat and be dry-aged [hung pudding comes out of the oven.” unwrapped in a cold store]. The fillet from my “Hmm. Sounds a bit like gilding the lily.” supplier was OK but it was wet-aged, in a vacuum “Eh?” pack.” Suppliers prefer wet ageing because It could have been the phrase “gilding the dry-aged beef loses 30% of its weight over a lily” that puzzled Arnaud. Or it might have month. “It’s already an expensive piece of meat been my inbred Yorkshire preference for but it’s still more when it’s dry-aged. The quality is plainness. I couldn’t say. ■

INTELLIGENCE

What’s the best escape

THE BIG QUESTION

When life is fraught, should you empty your mind, or engage it elsewhere? Six writers choose a way to zone out ANNE ENRIGHT NOVELIST “My Body is a Cage”, goes the song by Arcade Fire: the problem is getting out of there without letting the door slam behind you, because the greatest escape of all, unfortunately, is death. There are day passes, of course: drugs, dissociative states, psychosis. There is alcohol and sex, also meditation, the endorphin rush of exercise, the top of the mountain and the freewheel cycle downhill. Let us not forget poetry, the touch of someone you love; there is, when you think about it, love itself. But so effortful all of them, so exhausting, this battle through the ego to escape the ego, this pushing of the body to be free of the body, when all you really have to do to escape your sad sack of bones and flesh is take your clothes off, walk into the sea, and splash. It has to be the sea because the sea holds you up. It also slaps you and throws you about a bit, requiring your admiration, gratitude and respect. The sea is plentiful and cheap; you are, when you swim in it,

connected to every other beach and rock you swam from over the years. It has to be the sea because there, chopped about by the advancing waves, is the horizon, and this does some secret, muscular thing to your gaze. After five minutes’ swimming towards it, your brain will open: simple as a window in the month of May. It helps if the water is cold. It helps if the water is frightening; if you escape grabbing weed and the idea of jellyfish, if you turn from that grey harbour seal, with the neck of a nightclub bouncer and the eyes of a lover. You should come out of the sea as from a close encounter with the fearful and the strange; your flesh condensed by the cold, grazed by rocks, you should be bleeding quietly and freely from your big toe. After which you turn to look back at the beautiful water, remembering how you felt when you had nowhere to stand, and that was just fine.

HENRY MARSH NEUROSURGEON AND AUTHOR The London hospital where I work is seven minutes by bicycle from my home and I consider myself to be permanently on call for my patients. So in a sense I can never escape, unless I leave the country, and even then I am pursued on my mobile phone. But in fact I escape every day since my house has a little garden looking out onto a small local park, and at the end of the garden I have built a workshop with elaborate red wooden pillars in imitation of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The garden I leave largely to itself, so it is a managed wilderness of flowering bushes and tall hollyhocks, with a resident fox whom I tolerate provided she doesn’t dig too many holes in the flowerbeds. There were four fox cubs last year. The wisteria at the front of the house has grown over the roof and a noisy family of sparrows lives in the eaves (along with some squirrels whom I recently evicted), and this spring there was a blackbird nesting on the security light over the front door and a wren by the kitchen window. I ILLUSTRATIONS BILL BUTCHER

keep bees in the garden. They swarm regularly into my neighbour Selwyn’s garden, but he puts up with the invasions with good humour. He will ring me up if I am in the hospital, and I will cycle back as soon as I can and with a cardboard box climb up to wherever the swarm has settled, catch it, and return to work. I started making furniture when I was an impoverished medical student. My wife and I did not have a table so I made one from an old packing case. The only tools I had were a saw and a hammer. My brother admired it and asked me if I’d make one for him, and I said I would, for the price of a plane. Forty years later I have accumulated a huge collection of tools and have made many tables, beds, chests and other pieces (the early ones not very well, I must admit). I’m currently working on an oak table for one of my daughters. This is rather different from brain surgery. For a start, wooden joints don’t heal (but nor do they bleed), and the physical manipulations involved are entirely different – although not when sawing open the bone of the skull. There is the same joy in using your hands in a useful way but without all the anxieties. Neurosurgery is always dangerous, and operations often fail, with awful consequences for patients and their families, for which I cannot help but feel responsible. At least with woodwork the only risk is to my self-esteem, and an occasional bruised finger. The workshop looks out onto the garden and I spend two to three hours every evening making furniture or sharpening my tools, thinking only about the job in front of me, at home in my little demiparadise. Rus in urbe.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON PUBLISHER AND AUTHOR “Onward, upward, and inward” is my favourite motto. And inward is my favourite escape. What makes it all the more special is that going inward is both an escape and the ultimate reality. I completely get the sense of wonder that has led men and women through the ages to explore outer space, but personally I have always been much more fascinated with exploring

inner space. There is, of course, a connection between the two. Astronauts have often reported transformational experiences when they have looked back at Earth, a phenomenon that has been called “the overview effect”. But, as Thomas Merton put it, “What can we gain by sailing to the Moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.” Marcus Aurelius called that place I love escaping to our “inner citadel”. And, being both the emperor of Rome and a Stoic philosopher, he clearly demonstrated that you could escape into your inner citadel and rule an empire at the same time. You can be “in the world, but not of the world”. What is beyond doubt is that I, like most of us, spend most of my life outside that citadel. The key for me is quickly course-correcting – sometimes ten minutes of meditation or even a moment of conscious breathing is all it takes. I try to do it daily, working it in wherever I find myself – at the office, in a hotel, on an aeroplane (where it can be done even when the person in front of you reclines their seat). The aim is that as I grow older I can get better at escaping back into that place of stillness, imperturbability and grace, until it becomes second nature quickly to escape to what is actually our true nature. And there’s a bonus: this escape requires no passport, no planning ahead and no leaving home. >

INTELLIGENCE

> ADAM NICOLSON

AUTHOR AND BROADCASTER The best moment is always just after the beginning. I have a small boat nowadays, just under 16 feet long, and it is not the sort of boat people usually ooh and aah about. There’s nothing wooden in it, no delicious, polished spars. It has an aluminium mast and a fibreglass hull and all sorts of snap shackles and jamming cleats. So although I love the way all this works, sailing for me is not a kit thing. It is more about what happens when you get it all to go. I almost always sail alone, launching from a beach, and as I push off, jump in, lower the daggerboard, grab the helm, harden up the sheets and feel the wind coming and going on the skin of my cheek, it’s then that the miracle happens: all the elements that on land had seemed half-chaotic, banging here and there, too complicated to be coherent, suddenly come into a perfect, steady relationship — with each other and with you. The sails fill, acquire their beautiful, held-bosom shape, the boat heels away from the wind, you lean out against it, tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other, and, in that most expressive of sailing terms, you and the boat start to gather way.

The wake begins to bloom behind you; the cockpit drains gurgle; the bow-wave lifts and runs the length of the hull. In a dinghy, your own body is the governing counterpoise to the pressure of the wind on the sails, and that maybe is at the heart of why this is the greatest of escapes: there is no sitting back here. This is not an escape at all, but a plunging-in, a total immersion of mind and body in the ways of wind and sea, needing a small amount of skill maybe, but more than that a high attentiveness, a precision alertness to how things are, to the tide running around you, the shape of the gusts coming down off the hills, the rolling of the swell. That is what small boat sailing gives you: intimacy with the reality of the world.

ALAN JOHNSON POLITICIAN AND MEMOIRIST A warm kitchen on a cold winter’s afternoon. A sharp knife lies waiting on a wooden board ready to chop an array of vegetables. Rising from the hob, the aroma of onions frying gently in olive oil. There’s a play on the radio and some 8% Riesling in the fridge, ready to be quaffed over the next couple of hours. At some stage I will lay a table and light some candles. No one is allowed to share my kitchen, but the table will be set for two, or four, or six. I think of nothing but the job in hand. The moment for mental problem-solving comes later, over the washing up. I hardly cooked a thing until I was well into my 40s. Never even boiled an egg. For my generation the gender divide was wider than the Humber estuary. Nowadays, I cook at least once a week to escape the stress of everyday life (aware that, for many women, cooking is an aspect of that stress). When I decided to learn to cook I bought a kind of Janet-and-John beginners’ guide. I remember a complete page devoted to a drawing of a large vegetable with “Courgette” printed underneath in thick black type. I needed that book. Soon I was foraging through complicated recipes like a jungle explorer seeking out ever more exotic species. I became known as the Buckwheat Kid to relatives and friends forced to endure my early efforts; and one Christmas I baked my first cake as a present for my secretary. It was basically a load of

Tom Standage A Game, a Gadget and an App Time to face your Destiny, then go around the world in 80 Days sticky fruit held together by alcohol – more Chuck than Mary Berry. Now, I make a wicked butter bean, leek and Parmesan side dish; but my favourite is belly of pork in cider. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s.

LUCY KELLAWAY COLUMNIST AND NOVELIST Mostly, I find escaping easy. To escape my family I go to work; to escape from work I bid for things on eBay; to escape from the city I walk along the beach in north Cornwall; to escape from stress I turn my phone off. The escape that’s hardest – and most needed – is periodic flight from myself. Holidays are hopeless as I always end up bringing myself along. Cycling in crowded London streets is reasonably successful as you need to focus almost all your wits on not being knocked off, though on familiar routes my mind returns to its predictable, unwanted ways. Only asleep do I escape my thoughts altogether, though as I’m not conscious it doesn’t really count. By far the best waking escape I have yet found is upholstery. It is both difficult and varied – with the result that I can do it for hours without my thoughts wandering at all. There are so many different stages – gouging out old tacks, stretching webbing, banging in nails, sewing with a curved ten-inch needle, stuffing handfuls of hair (80% pig, 20% cattle) under bridles, cutting wadding to fit – and each task has to be done just so. A false move and you have a wonky spring or a tack in your finger. An upholstery project in full swing occupies your mind, your body and your house, which is given over to banging and flying hair. You escape not only from yourself but from your century, doing exactly the same things – if considerably less competently – that were done by craftsmen 100 years ago. Upholstery has three other advantages. First, you don’t have to talk to anyone. The nearest you get to human contact is consulting YouTube when you get stuck and watching videos of an old man stitching springs to webbing, breathing noisily as he does so. Secondly, it’s profoundly satisfying to fix something broken – to take a sagging Victorian chair and make it strong and plumply proud does the soul good. But best of all, the beauty of upholstery is that when you are done escaping from yourself, you have something solid to sit on. ■

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Which answer gets your vote? Go to moreintelligentlife.com and make your choice. Search “Big Question”

A GAME DESTINY The most feverishly awaited game of the year has landed. Five years in the making, with a budget of $500m, “Destiny” is the first instalment of a new franchise from Bungie, creators of the “Halo” series of sci-fi shoot-’em-ups. It’s a wildly ambitious fusion of two genres: first-person shooters (like “Halo”) and massive multiplayer role-playing games (like “World of Warcraft”). Bungie calls “Destiny” a “shared-world shooter” as it blurs the distinction between the two: you meet other players as you explore its gorgeous sci-fi landscapes, and you can team up with them for some missions as you struggle to protect mankind from alien invaders. You can also upgrade your skills, weapons and armour, and go into multiplayer combat arenas. “Destiny” lacks the relentless narrative drive of “Halo”, because in a multiplayer game not everyone can be the saviour of mankind. But the hybrid format leaves plenty of room for innovation and expansion, as Bungie aims to deliver a game world that feels truly alive. Even if it doesn’t quite live up to the hype, it draws you in: “Halo” players will feel at home, but “Destiny” offers a deeper, darker, more complex universe to explore. Destiny for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4: around £40

A GADGET SPACED360 PORTABLE SPEAKER Portable Bluetooth speakers are great when you want to eat outside and take your music with you. But crank up the volume and they can’t deliver the goods: you need a mains-powered speaker or audio dock for that. The Spaced360 squares this circle. It’s battery-powered, but can pump out music at hefty volumes for hours at a time, and is powerful enough to be the main sound system in your kitchen or living room. Its unusual shape sends sound in all directions, unlike its brick-like rivals. Audiophiles may be appalled at the signal processing this demands, but it sounds great. Colourful neoprene covers provide greater protection, and the nifty charging dock means it’s always ready to go walkabout. Spaced360: around £250; spaced360.com

AN APP 80 DAYS This retelling of Jules Verne’s classic tale is a cross between a “choose your own adventure” book and a 3D board game. As Passepartout, you must guide Phileas Fogg in his effort to circle the globe in 80 days. The story has been given a clever steampunk twist, with automaton armies on the march in Europe, and airships, mechanical birds and steam-powered submarines to carry you on your way. As you travel from city to city, managing your money, keeping an eye on the calendar and looking out for items that can be sold at a profit later, you’ll also see other players moving across the game’s 3D globe. The narrative and gameplay are brilliantly interwoven, and the result is such fun that when I failed on my first circumnavigation – it took 87 days – I immediately started again. 80 Days for iPhone and iPad: £2.99

INTELLIGENCE

Oliver Morton The Music of Science The flow of a river in Germany shows how, when man channels nature, he channels history too Earlier this year, I was on the faculty of a summer school at the University of Heidelberg. My daily walk to the campus took me across a footbridge over the Neckar. By British standards the Neckar, like most rivers that have chunks of a continent to drain, rather than just slices of an island, is impressively large. It is also impressively constrained. For most of its span, the footbridge passed over a system of weirs and gates which, when open, let the river tumble a few metres with a pleasing power into a downstream bed laced with gravel banks and willow trees. At the north end a drop-free navigable channel allowed barge traffic to remain above the fray as it moved to and from a set of locks downstream. The weir gates opened and closed according to a logic I could not fathom; the barges passed through according to the rhythms of trade. In his excellent book “The Conquest of Nature”, David Blackbourn tells the story of how the Germans came to control their often unruly rivers. The star of the show is the upper Rhine, into which the Neckar flows at Mannheim, about 20 kilometres downstream. In its southern part the upper Rhine was, in the 18th century, a broad, braided maze of lagoons and backwaters; in the north, a higgledypig of meanders. In both parts it was capricious, changing its mind regularly about which way to flow, flooding towns and villages regularly and, sometimes, permanently. In the 19th century it was brought to heel, in large part by Johann Gottfried Tulla and those who carried on his vision after his death. “No river…needs more than one bed,” Tulla declared, and he set about putting the upper Rhine into what he decided was its place. Its course was shortened, its flow quickened, its lines straightened. The process Tulla set in train continued through the 19th century to the 20th, constraining Germany’s rivers more and more. Learning all this added to my appreciation of the subject that had brought me to Heidelberg in the first place. The summer school was being held for the benefit of young researchers from all sorts of disciplines who had an interest in climate geoengineering – the deliberate use of technology to counteract, in whole or in part, the anthropogenic warming of the planet. Such efforts could well be seen as Tulla’s sort of thing: one of the justifications he gave for his great labours in “On the Rectification of the Rhine” was that “the climate along the Rhine will become more pleasant”. To his Enlightenment mind, improving on nature through grand engineering schemes seemed, well, second nature – a second nature, superior to the first, that it was human nature to create. The subordinate Neckar of today might reinforce Tulla’s feelings that human control over nature was possible and justified.

But looking a little further shows some of the drawbacks. Tulla was motivated mostly by a desire to do away with floods – but to a large extent he merely moved them downstream, as critics warned would be the case. The rectification of the upper Rhine let floodwaters from the Alps and the Black Forest get to the lower Rhine quicker, to the soggy detriment of Koblenz, Bonn and Cologne; the flood defences they then put in place led to the floods moving yet farther north as water from the heart of the continent found itself reaching the end of the Rhine twice as fast as in years gone by. There were other drawbacks. The new belief that people could safely farm right up to the banks of the Rhine meant that its beautiful riverbank forests of oak, elm, alder and willow were cut down, its otters driven out. And though navigability had never been part of Tulla’s agenda, his better-controlled river encouraged larger barges, which in turn encouraged straightening and deepening well beyond that needed for flood control. It was, indeed, for navigation, not flood control, that they chained the Neckar in the early 20th century. The swifter rivers, stripped of sandbanks and still waters, lost their salmon and sturgeon, gaining eels, carp and perch instead. No one appears to know why there is a fish-ladder on the weir at Heidelberg; no fish seem to use it. All of which holds lessons for wouldbe geoengineers. The first: there will be unintended (if not unforeseen) consequences. Tulla was not planning to flood Koblenz. The second: those consequences may be as likely to lead to calls for further engineering as to calls for stopping what has been started. Anyone who thinks that they can start re-engineering the planet just a bit and that no one will take the ideas further needs to know that history is against them. This is all the more so because once you engineer for one purpose, other applications have a way of following on. If Tulla had no thought for the navigation that now dominates the Neckar, he certainly didn’t care about the modest amount of hydropower generation that now takes place at its weirs. The flow of history is less easily channelled than that of rivers, and anyone who thinks otherwise has no business trying to change it. Climate geoengineering would be a radical step with unforeseeable consequences. It is surely not to be undertaken rashly, for the sake of a few, or as a seemingly simple way out of the world’s problems. At the same time, it is worth remembering that even great change comes to be accepted, even quotidian. The smooth-flowing Neckar above the weir is grand, its park-like verges happy playgrounds; the messy bit below the weir is charming too. The great barges carry people’s livelihood. And on a stone pier above it all perches a heron, hopeful and beautiful. n ILLUSTRATION PETE GAMLEN

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INTELLIGENCE

Like parents and their teenagers, cricket and baseball are very much alike and yet determined to remain a mystery to each other. Fourteen years ago, as a 22-year-old professional cricketer who spent his winters in New York, I began writing a book comparing these two sports. I joined up with the New York Mets and swung at some pitches. I lived through an all-New York World Series, trying to follow the path that leads from the baseball diamond to America’s soul. I wandered the streets of Manhattan in the days after 9/11 and watched the Yankees summon a moment of sporting ecstasy amid the rubble. “Playing Hard Ball” was the result. But one question – the big one – seemed too risky even to address. Which game is actually better? Constraints came from both directions. I felt loyalty to cricket, which paid my wages and filled my dreams. Baseball exerted a different hold: a sense of joyous thanks, bordering on infatuation, towards not only a game but also a city. Now there are no such excuses; daunted but accepting, I must plunge into judgment. It’s a penalty shoot-out, cricket versus baseball, played over five criteria. First: drama. Cricket, especially the five-day Test, has the ability to nurture deepening tension. The crowd hold several narratives in their minds. What might happen is as interesting as what actually happens, an imaginative depth made possible by cricket’s defining characteristic: time. But for sheer dramatic ecstasy, baseball has the edge. In its rarity and decisiveness, the home run – two extreme forces colliding with brutal symmetry – is like a goal in football (only less liable to be scrappy and untidy). One-nil to baseball – or one-and-oh, as pitchers say. Second: beauty. Both sports are photogenic. Baseball’s archive of black-and-white photos – the slide home to base, studs high and mud flying, grace and clarity of purpose down in the dirt – matches anything in the museum at Lord’s. The double play, devastatingly complete and perfect, may even trump the direct hit that follows a diving stop at midwicket. But even the smoothest line drive must bow down before cricket’s cover drive. You could watch decades of baseball and never see the equal of David Gower driving. The bat held loosely, the swing an unfurling rather than a coiled spring, the effect gentleness as well as majesty: 1-1. Third: psychological depth. Before I understood baseball, I used to think this was no contest. But I was watching the wrong things. I used to study the batter (my sporting cousin, after all), trying to enter into his mind, feel his struggle. But the psychological roles are reversed in baseball. In cricket, because he is expected to win any given ball, and because losing his wicket is

utterly final, it is the batsman who lives with the guillotine hanging over his neck. In baseball, I eventually realised, that is the life of a pitcher. He, not the batter, is expected to prevail in the next play. Giving up a run in baseball is rare and potentially disastrous, so it has more in common with losing a wicket than with scoring a (cricket) run. This is sport’s ultimate paradox: the more you are expected to succeed, the greater the pressure. The scoring units are just a currency – the more numerous they are, the lower their value. When I saw the torment in the eyes of pitchers, how they live with the terror of conceding a run, how they are solitary and exposed, surrounded by teammates whose primary purpose is to score runs not to prevent them – grasping all this suffering, I felt suddenly at home. Cricket at its best, however, offers a more symmetrical psychological contest. Baseball batters are not around long enough to go through as great a struggle. In cricket, when bat and ball are in perfect equipoise, each protagonist in danger of toppling over with only the slightest misstep, the pressure is equal on both. It’s 2-1 to cricket, by a whisker. Fourth: is it fun to play? Any sport, at a level of mastery, offers deep satisfaction. So let’s focus on the experience of the amateur or the child. How high are the barriers to pleasure? Cricket’s technical restraints – bowlers forbidden from bending the arm, batsmen taught to remain stately and sidewayson rather than rotating like a lumberjack hacking at a tree – are bound up with its aesthetic potential. But they certainly don’t help the uninitiated. Baseball, more natural and less buttoned-up, is much closer to the way we throw and hit before we learn how we are supposed to do it. And the grass doesn’t have to be so manicured. In ordinary life, too, cricket’s hunger for time becomes a drag, with the club game relying on spouses being willing to put in a long shift as a single parent. Messing around in a field after a picnic? It’s got to be baseball; 2-2. Judging the Booker prize, Philip Larkin set himself the ultimate test: “Did I care? If so, what was the quality of the caring?” All sports fans care. But not all sports allow the same complexity and subtlety. Every contest has a clear central story, but what about the subplots and counter-rhythms? Here cricket, which can lay on a series of five Tests, is unrivalled. It becomes something you live with. Baseball is a stirring symphony, cricket is the Ring Cycle. So 3-2 to cricket? For now, yes. But if Twenty20 – an effort to squeeze cricket into the three-hour slot that baseball has always occupied – consumes the whole sport, cricket will be just another game, lacking a usp and looking worryingly desperate to please. Cricket can’t beat baseball by imitating it. The parent is rarely well served by copying the child. ■

TOPHAM

Ed Smith Reading the Game Time for a needle match: cricket against baseball. Which is the better sport?

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The Taiwan Lantern Festival, named one of the best festivals in the world, will next be held in Taichung in March 2015

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Taiwan, a crossroads of cultures

A visit to Taiwan puts you at the crossroads of cultures. Eastern beliefs, religions and values meet Western ones. Everywhere you look, architecture, crafts and practices reflect the duality of tradition and modernity. Newer Chinese migrants speaking different dialects mix harmoniously with Taiwan’s Austronesian Aborigine population, comprising fourteen tribes who speak more than ten different languages. Agricultural communities continue to thrive amidst one of the most modernised and technophilic Asian societies. All this furious intermingling has led to a cultural explosion that is expressed in museums, temples, folk traditions, language and cuisine. Nobody personifies Taiwan’s cultural mix as well as singer Chang Hui-Mei—better known as “A-Mei”—a Taiwanese aboriginal of the Puyuma nation who was surrounded and inspired by tribal music in her childhood, rising to become one of the biggest stars in the Mandarin music scene, combining glitzy pop, rock and R&B in spectacular shows. Catch one, if you can. Taiwan’s cornucopia of cultural treats may seem daunting to first-time visitors unsure what to do. One smart strategy is to participate in one of the many festivals sprinkled liberally throughout the year. Taiwanese take great pride in their festivals: exhilarating, fun occasions that are also—unusually for Asia—undergirded by remarkable logistical efficiency and safety. You will find a potpourri of people yet with plenty of private space. Relentless energy combined with personal safety. An Asian sensory overload tinged with genuine warmth. For instance, the Taiwan Lantern Festival, which rotates annually between regions, will next be held in Taichung in March 2015, a sort of grand finale at the end of the Chinese New Year holidays. The Festival, which is entering its 25th year, is the flagship event for an island-wide celebration: all over Taiwan, specialised events reflect local customs and traditions, from the Sky Lantern Festival in Pingxi to the Beehive Fireworks Festival in Yanshui. Lantern making has its roots in Chinese folklore—often to show respect to gods and goddesses or to ward off evil. Festival attendees can make traditional lanterns there while marvelling at spectacular light displays. Wonderful accompanying entertainment ranges from foreign performing artists to delectable local delights, including auspicious rice dumplings. A Discovery Channel show reckons it is one of the best festivals in the world. Colourful festivals are also the hallmark of Taiwan’s aboriginal communities. There are many across the island and throughout the year, from the Puyuma people’s Monkey Ritual, a coming-of-age festival involving wrestling, to the Yami’s Flying Fish Festival, where men don loincloths, rattan helmets and vests. Of the many harvest festivals, the most famous is that of the Amis people, the biggest aboriginal group, who live on Taiwan’s east coast. With their vibrant red dress and deep, melodious music as pageantry, you can lose yourself in a revelry of song, salted pork, fish and millet liquor. You might also find yourself developing an appreciation for Taiwan’s fine craftsmanship. Taiwanese artisans adroitly incorporate the latest technologies while staying true to ancient philosophies. A bewildering array of handicrafts, including bamboo furniture, hand-woven baskets, brassware, ceramics, glass art, lanterns, marble sculptures, metalwork and woodcarvings, will please collectors and spectators alike. The Sanyi International Woodcarving Art Festival, held annually in early autumn, is a display of Taiwan’s finest camphor wood sculptures. Here you will get to observe craftspeople in action and also try your hand at a variety of wood-based activities and games. Crafts aside, there are also a panoply of other shopping destinations in Taiwan, from quaint and kitschy Taiwanese night markets to glittering new malls. But it is likely that your best cultural mementos from Taiwan will be not merchandise but memories. Perhaps of Taipei’s National Palace Museum, one of the world’s foremost repositories of Chinese artefacts. Or simply strolling around Taipei, through a blur of sights, sounds and smells, marvelling at how one of the world’s technology hubs can also be “Asia’s most laid-back capital city”, in the words of Buzzfeed, an online news site. Taiwanese culture accommodates and incorporates all these differences. Which is why this truly is the Heart of Asia.

www.taiwan.net.tw

STYLE Necklace, Siegelson

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Platinum Moonâ&#x20AC;? moonstone and diamond necklace, $115,000 including earrings (not shown), siegelson.com

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jewellery

Poetry rocks Six original poems, each about a stone; six pieces of jewellery, each made with that stone. Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson and others dig into the mineral world

Blue moonstone by David Harsent Not because I ask you to, but hold this stone in your mouth: blue blush, a teardrop-cut… It’s late in the day and you are lost to me, standing beneath a sky empty of any light in a place I will never see. A north wind comes in, a sudden shift under your skin, as it might be a burrowing worm, as it might be a moth settling on bark to grow invisible. Tongue it against your teeth: that taste will come back to you when your mouth is given over, when there’s unrepentant truth in what you have to hear – must hear – when, in one stopped breath, comes the certainty of loss, being an ache in your finger bones, being sorrow first and last, a path that will take you from where you are to the ends of the earth under a rising moon, wyrt moon. That blue will soak you then; that blue is a disguise for death.

Folklore has it that a moonstone held in the mouth will predict love’s outcome

Photographs Mike Diver Post production russ street

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Lapis lazuli by Imtiaz Dharker If you thirst for blue beyond ultramarine, here is the blue that stains the artist’s hand, lifted out of the most precious seam in the generous heart of Badakhshan to place an azure light in the Pharaoh’s eyes after he is gone, lap at the Virgin’s cloak, seep into the masjid walls. A prize to protect the wearer, allow the hope that a simple ore could save the prey and shield the savaged heart from harm; that in a broken land it could find a way to wrap the child in sacred blue, a charm or talisman to still the approaching drone, if you could only mine the prayer inside the stone.

Necklace, Elizabeth Gage

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“Nefertiti” lapis lazuli and granulated gold necklace, £42,000, elizabeth-gage.com

Opals by Fiona Sampson Opals my grandmother loved, opals kept in musty boxes, velvet and dust and touch-me-not mysteries – the stuffy interior out of Doctor Freud and my grandmother among her trophies sliding on the opal ring, sliding the opal necklace between her fingers – something dirty, sexual almost in her pleasure, and the opals with their each-way facets their hard-to-believe fairground glitter were dirty too, too foreign, vulgar even, I thought with a tremor I didn’t recognise was sexual, was shame because I saw how the colours shone inside each like old coins in a vitrine, and how like old coins the stones were stained by something, rumour or violence, she found thrilling: opals that are my birthstone, that I inherited with the rest of it – tea service, couch, blue plush boxes the crooked glancing character of defect everything displayed like clues that afternoon in the opulent dark flat south-coast England nineteen eighty-something gone like a summer storm above the sea.

Earring, Armenta

Opal, diamond, gold and oxidised silver earrings, £4,160 a pair, armentacollection.com

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Morganite by Swithun Cooper How does she choose us, the men whose shadows she moves through as we travel to the city? She is flush; she is light striking copper; her grip leaves our wrists bruised pink as the raised print on £50 notes. I know you have felt her already. Good luck. You must go where she takes you. Me? She led me to the stocks: past marble engravings to walls of darkened glass behind which I prospered. I’m minted now. I’m marked. I work through the night, and as the markets twist to keep her around me I offer up gifts: a clouded gilt mirror, a rosewood planchette, two blush-coloured stones from an antique jewellery set.

I know you have felt her. I have seen you cross the street and roll up your cuff. I have seen the skin beneath. I know you have heard it – halfway through a deal, her voice on a phone you have yet to dial. I know that right now she is pressing on your pulse. I know she does not really choose us, the men of the city. We choose to come here, to the places we know she will be.

Named after the banker J.P. Morgan, morganite should be carried for good luck in finance

Ring, Chanel

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“Big Panache Mor” pink morganite, diamond and white gold ring, €105,000, chanel.com

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Amethyst by Michael Symmons Roberts So help me, there is nothing – not one word – I can say that would be solid as a ring. If I wrote you a sonnet, would your faith in it outlast the fourteenth line? I am no cynic, yet since I bought this purple gem for you, geologists in China, Russian miners, cavers in Brazil have struck rich plum-blood seams and made my ring a fairground prize. Ink under skin? What form, what amber or aspic can hold as prices rise and fall? The ground shifts beneath our soles, no trace of love will ever be combed from my ashes, deciphered from my dna. And yet my love for you is sure, until a cache of greater love is found, so help me, lover. Ring, Jewellery Theatre

“Enchanted Rainforest” amethyst, tsavorite, diamond and gold ring, £23,350, jewellerytheatre.com

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Emerald by Ruth Padel Below is the same as above, says the Emerald Tablet Jung saw in a dream. You’ve passed Security, you’re entering the mine. You were looking for love: try the mysteries of earth. Put on the waterproof, hard hat, rubber boots and gloves. You found it in the Vedas: Emeralds bring luck. You’re winched into the dark on a platform-cage through a rushing flood. Can you trust the chains? The water’s warm, the motor rattles, the temperature is hot enough to suffocate, stop Orpheus in his song. Forty metres. Forty more. At the bottom, a sauna labyrinth of carbon, formed by the tectonic shunt that made the Andes. Torchlight. Blackened faces. They don’t get salaries, they’re paid for what they find. Do you, the adept of “Theatrum Chemicum”, desire the formula, the liquid and gas chromium and vanadium crystallised to hexagon in boiling brine? You slosh, crouching, through water. A hundred claw-points tease the roof, the pitch-black honeycomb of tunnels haunted by a glint-fire ghost of absinthe, Nefertiti, Melusine. The call comes Here! and everyone stampedes. A thousand jackhammers, ten thousand ricochets and a raw rock-face brocade of dazzle-green. Any pick-swing could make your fortune. You’re surrounded, oxygen levels plummet and you don’t care for this is the myth of all myths. Jackpot. The suddenly answered prayer. Overhead, slow sunrise stipples emerald slopes of cloud forest and sugar cane, to rose. Children trawl abandoned shafts. Women search breast-deep in the river for a glimpse of the Enchanter. Streaked faces, wild eyes in a panda blur – that’s all of us in our anonymities and hope. Below is the same as above. Emerald is wire fencing, a guard with pump-action shotgun, the paramilitaries of Víctor Carranza, cartel king, and the black mud dance of chaos. Children know you reach the Emerald City only on ruby slippers. Emerald is blood. But somehow you make it back to the market-place. La Candelaria looks like any square: small lunch-bars and glum

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traffic. The emeralds are invisible, carried in twists of paper to open air. The only light dealers trust to check for flux-grown polymers, synthetic glass from labs in California, is the Incas’ naked sun. Emerald is heart of alchemy. Ferny bubbles, mystical imperfections, flaws that make each stone unique, trapped in mineral as it forms like fantasies embedded in the soul. Emerald is spring, translating underworld to stony idioms of the brain, a kingfisher reflected in the secret bowl of ocean. Verdant but easily chipped, healing but poison, colour of Venus, birthstone of May, but also the green-eyed monster. Double-edged. Watch a dealer hold new facets to the sky. It’s a risk, renewing dreams. It’s putting yourself through hell like Orpheus, not knowing what you’ll lose. In one small blazing stone – as green as grass, as Acamar or Rastaban, the brightest stars – you face what transformation means. Ask the commissionista. This is the life you’ll pay for. Open his paper. Choose. n

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Necklace, David Morris

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wildflowerâ&#x20AC;? emerald, diamond and white gold necklace, price on application, davidmorris.com

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Rebecca Willis Applied Fashion Touch, taste, smell, even sound – close your eyes, and clothes sense is at your fingertips I don’t recommend shopping for clothes while wearing gloves. I tried it last winter by mistake when taking refuge from the cold in a local boutique. And I realised, as I moved along the rail, that I couldn’t get enough feedback from the clothes without my sense of touch. I could gauge by eye the size that might fit me, but otherwise I might as well have been shopping on the internet. Fashion appeals largely to our sense of sight – it’s all about the look, the adverts would have you believe – but what we actually choose to wear and what endures in our wardrobes is equally influenced by our other senses. Without touching the fabric, I couldn’t form an opinion about what I was looking at. The skin of our hands can, in a microsecond, distinguish soft cloth from rough, natural from synthetic, and we make an instant judgment about whether we’d like to be swathed in it. Often, we move swiftly on. A quick caress also tells us whether the fabric is going to be itchy – crucially important if, like me, you’d rather be stung by wasps than wear a lambswool sweater for a day. Without wanting to sound like the princess who felt the pea through layers of mattresses, I have to say that a badly placed piece of lace can render a bra unwearable, and a seam cheaply sewn with nylon thread can do the same to a pair of trousers. Our sense of smell plays its part, too, not least because certain shops crop-spray their interiors and their wares with their signature scents. Zadig & Voltaire and Abercrombie & Fitch are two of the worst offenders on this front – I am planning an oxygen-tank-wearing protest one day. Some shops smell without even trying, though, notably those which sell leather goods – in the cheaper ones especially, the mortal smell of the tannery lingers on. It is a cinematic cliché that one character who misses another will bury their nose in the clothes of the departed, but like most clichés it’s based on fact. Research at Rockefeller University indicates that the human olfactory system is able to distinguish between a trillion different odours, which means that everyone on the planet can have their own unique fragrance – and 993 billion other smells will still be left over for everything else, from flowers to food, farmyards and pollution. Our clothes are like olfactory diaries, too, recording where we have been: in the days

illustration bill brown

of indoor smoking, a visit to the pub left a stale beer-and-fags tang that outlasted any hangover. The after-aroma of a good bonfire, on the other hand, always seems pleasant to me. And when it comes to second-hand clothes, it is their smell – or perhaps the idea that they might smell? – that makes some people find owning them impossible to contemplate. Clothes make noises, too, even though we don’t always notice them in the shop – too-clicky heels, buckles that jingle, a creaky bra (really), the hard swish of waterproofs, the soft burr of corduroy trousers. What we wear provides part of the soundtrack of everyday life, and there are online companies that sell clothing sound-effects to designers of video games and films to make them more believable. Not only can you buy “clothing rustle, acrylic”, for instance, for a mere $1.95, but you have 13 different acrylic rustles to choose from. It might make a fun party game to play the sounds and make people guess what they are – although the distinction between “gloves latex, put on” and “gloves latex, take off” is a fine one. For centuries, if literature is any guide, the rustling of skirts was synonymous with femininity. Edgar tells King Lear not to let “the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman”, and Tolstoy’s novels are punctuated by rustlings – of skirts, of starched petticoats, of a silk dress – on the other side of doors. Long skirts, particularly the voluminous ones of the 19th century, were an encumbrance, and rustling was their aural equivalent. Because women in those days were in effect property, you start to wonder whether the dresses had a dual function as a sort of cow bell or tracking device. Taste is the least important of our five senses when it comes to clothes – unless used metaphorically, of course, when it is the most. The fact that edible garments seem to be mostly of the crotchless variety tells you all you need to know about that particular retail niche. My son, when he was about six years old, did go through a stage of eating his collars, and I know of a child who consumed most of his school blazer. But those were passing, developmental phases. Babies explore the world with their mouths. For the rest of us, when we go shopping – just like the wearing of gloves – it’s not really recommended. n

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THE LINE OF BEAUTY

The hood

It may have started life as a way to keep warm, but now a hood can contain a multitude of meanings. Matthew Sweet uncovers the possibilities

Monastic “St Francis of Assisi”, c1487 If St Francis rolled up today at the Bluewater shopping mall near London, hoping to blow a wad at Tommy Hilfiger, he’d get no further than the doors. The hoodie is banned. “Guests”, says the mall, extravagantly, “don’t feel at all comfortable” among the cowled. Confirmation perhaps that Francis’s monastic predecessors were right to adopt a uniform modelled on the clothes of their poorest and most unloved contemporaries. The habit was formed in the fourth century. It still fits. Embroidered Valentino AW14 Is there room in the calendar of Middle Earth for Lothlórien Fashion Week? If so, here’s the design that would rouse the line of orcs on the front row: a hooded cloak, conjured by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative directors of Valentino since 2008. Sarah Lamb, principal dancer at the Royal Ballet since 2006, is the being en pointe beneath its folds. This, I suppose, is why the Lady Galadriel needed that mirror. Sarah Lamb wears double felt, sequined and embroidered cape, £13,050, by Valentino (valentino.com); body suit, £23, American Apparel (americanapparel.net); shoes, similar from £39.95, Bloch (blochworld.com). Lamb dances the lead in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” at the Royal Opera House, London, Dec 19th-27th PHOTOGRAPHER RICK GUEST STYLIST OLIVIA POMP

Hair Jonathon @ Billi Currie salon Make-up Ruby Hammer

STYLE

Red “Lonely Woman in a Park” by Wladyslaw Wankie, c1900 The red is so eye-catching that it renders its wearer nameless; just as it stops children asking why a girl in a riding hood can’t just saddle up and gallop to granny’s cottage. Perhaps it was the colour that made Little Red Riding Hood so indigestible: the Wolf stood no chance of metabolising her carcass. What does she signify? Rebirth, say the Freudians – and maybe Wankie, a Polish exile in 19th-century Munich, did stand at his easel, dreaming of a day when his nation could be cut from the belly of Russia.

Inuit Greenland, c1940 By the time an unknown photographer snapped this baby snug in her sealskin second womb, southerly audiences had been feeling warm and fuzzy about the Inuit for decades – thanks to the cuddling and nose-rubbing in Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922). Perhaps it was a guilty pleasure. The mid-20th century was the era of the outdoor baby-cage and the stern injunctions in John B. Watson’s “Psychological Care of the Infant and Child” (1928): “Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap.” Tears can freeze at 40 below zero. Parka Mick Jagger, 1964 He may be in a parka, but Jagger is no Mod spending amphetamine-swashed weekends kicking over deck chairs in Brighton. Terry O’Neill took this shot, but he wasn’t the only one – David Bailey, too, snapped Jagger hooded and coquettish. So let’s credit the iconography to the subject. The parted lips, the halo of fur, the hand pinching soft folds of fabric: it’s Dietrich in “Shanghai Express”, Garbo in “Flesh and the Devil”. Satisfaction seems imminent. >

Sporting Cassius Clay, Kentucky, 1963 Clay, as yet untransmogrified into Ali, jazz-hands his objection to the presence of the snapper from Life magazine – or to the Jim Crow conditions on the other side of the limousine glass – while dressed like some lost order of mendicant. Why do boxers do this? To maintain the heat stoked by last-minute skipping and bag-punching. To magnify the big moment when they reveal, ringside, the result of weeks of dieting and violence. But most importantly, perhaps, to reduce their world to one narrow path of action – a tunnel down which they can steam, an unstoppable force in search of an immovable object.

Tudor “Mary Wotton, Lady Guildford”, 1527 The French hood, as Lady Guildford’s headwear was known, was popularised by Anne Boleyn at the court of Henry VIII, and thus condemned to yo-yo in and out of fashion with every passing regal consort. The black veil flows backwards over the neck. No symbolism intended, I suspect – but someone must have watched these fluttering on execution day, and breathed the words “memento mori”. Superhero Herb Ritts, 1988 It’s bad luck to see a superhero from behind – it means they’ve decided not to save you from the burning building; also it looks, inevitably, like something from the ninth circle of Tinder. This is Michael Keaton during the filming of “Batman”. Is Michael at home? The photographer doesn’t care, and would like you to see this as a sculpture. A Brancusi, perhaps, crafted from Ann Summers leatherette.

STYLE

AKG, Getty, Corbis, © Herb Ritts/Trunk Archive, George Rodger

Duffle Paul Gallico, 1952 A novelist with an unerring nose for popular taste, Gallico makes a good fist of anticipating the kind of image guaranteed to go viral on Twitter. Kittens, yes, but the duffle hood is the real killer – cosy enough for a cold day in Manhattan, yet dropping a hint of Left Bank, beatnik and Michaelmas-in-Oxford. Six years later, the same look worked for Paddington Bear. But not as well as it did for Gallico. Paddington lived in a box-room in west London; Paul died rich, and in Monaco.

CONCEALING Jerez de la Frontera, 2006 It’s not the Klan. These are penitents at a Holy Week cathedral procession in Andalusia – and the KKK don’t do apologies. Why is it those starched spikes make us nervous? Blame D.W. Griffith, whose “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) made heroes of the klansmen and fluffed their membership to a 4.5m peak. But if the hood gave anonymity to Klan lynch mobs, it was also a gift to the infiltrators who exposed them – and who knew that real justice works uncovered. Hip-hop A$AP Rocky, 2012 A$AP Rocky – the Harlem-born hip-hop star – transforms the hoodie into a form of macho drag. Not since Ursula Andress emerged from the waves has anyone been quite so pouting and unzipped. Rocky’s own line of sweatshirts carry a printed declaration: “I be that pretty motherf***** A$AP Rocky”. Not quite “I am Spartacus”, but close. That cowl is a place to hide – but also a place from which to challenge those suspicious of your motive for concealment. n

style

built to last

Skogskyrkogården

Our new series pinpoints what makes a durable design. Kieran Long champions a Swedish cemetery that is both modern and classical

Susanne Hallmann

When you arrive at the main entrance, you are presented with two possible routes. One path rises up a gentle hill towards a large granite cross and a severe colonnade. You’d probably take this route if you were attending a funeral: the pillars and the space just out side them signal something like an institution. This is the crematorium, a communal place. To the right is the path you might take if you were visiting a loved one’s grave, a journey you are more likely to make alone and at regular intervals: weekly, monthly, less frequently. It begins by climbing irreg ular steps to the top of a large, artificial mound or tumulus, where a group of trees is planted and a high hedge stands. The hedge creates an enclosure, and all you can see as you stand there are the sky and the can opies of trees – deciduous, so they will change with the seasons. This is Almhöjden, the “grove of contem plation”. It takes you away from the city: the mound obscures the view of the railway station that probably brought you to the cemetery, and puts you in another place. The hill and the grove at its summit remove you from the world of train timetables, and prepare you for a more mortal journey. The right to build Skogskyrkogården (literally, “woodland cemetery”) in southern Stockholm was won in a council-run design competition. It was 1914, and the winners were Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund. Then both 30 years old, they would become

two of the most influential architects of the 20th cen tury; in their contrasting ways they define Swedish architecture to this day. Asplund’s red rotunda at the City Library, a building on the cusp of modernism but with its stylistic roots in an older architecture, is one of Stockholm’s defining monuments. Lewer entz went on to build several religious buildings of unmatched power, in particular the churches of St Mark’s in Björkhagen and St Peter’s in Klippan with their elemental brick walls and thick mortar joints – a stylistic quirk that has often been parodied. Skogskyrkogården tackles head-on the ques tion of how architecture can articulate the passing of time. Inevitably there’s a sense of an ending about it. But Asplund and Lewerentz tried to create an expe rience that emphasised not the finality of death, but the slow, circular rhythms of the natural world. Skog skyrkogården is a choreographed passage through a landscape, with episodic experiences of chapels, graves, colonnades and, above all, nature. Your senses are activated by the walk through the place: the smell of pine trees, the darkness of the for ests, the sounds of birds. The journey takes time, and, as on a pilgrimage, you are made ready for it by stop ping points, places of spiritual and psychological prep aration for the next stage. Places like the Almhöjden mound, which prepares you for the long walk down a densely wooded avenue called Seven Springs Way. >

Quiet power Far left Inside Lewerentz’s Chapel of Resurrection, at the heart of both the cemetery and modern Swedish architecture. Left The path past Almhöjden, the mounded “grove of contemplation”

STYLE

Kassia St Clair A Matter of Taste

Pendant lamps: turn-on, or turn-off? > The cemetery is not so much timeless as operating with the longest and slowest chronological rhythms: of the cosmos, of ritual, of life and the afterlife. It is a very powerful place. Asplund took the lead on most of the buildings, designing the Woodland Chapel, the crematorium and the visitor centre. But it is Lewerentz’s Chapel of Resurrection that faces you at the end of the Seven Springs Way. As you head towards its Corinthian portico, stone graves are arranged either side of you, not in rows, but scattered at the foot of tall trees. It has a special quietness from the thick pine needles on the floor, or, in winter, from the snow; there is only a narrow fissure of sky above the path. Every gravestone is the same size, and they recall stone circles or runestones. Ancient Scandinavian spirituality combines with modern Swedish egalitarianism. In the Resurrection Chapel, Lewerentz saw an opportunity to unite different architectural languages from across the millennia. The nave of the small chapel is oriented east/west, in the Christian tradition. But the Corinthian capitals of the portico’s columns – a reference to the very beginning of European architecture, in Greece and Rome – face north along the avenue. The exit from the church is in the western façade of an otherwise unadorned exterior that heralds the elemental, plain architecture of the modern tradition. The interior too is stark, with a decorated canopy above the altar and little else. Three south-facing windows pour light onto the nave from the side. This is highly unconventional – in most churches, light enters from behind the altar. It’s a tiny building, but an extraordinary synthesis of secular and sacred, ancient and modern, Christian and pagan. This is the great achievement of the Skogskyrkogården. At a moment when historical styles of architecture were being sacrificed in favour of the scientific and rational demands of modernism, the cemetery showed the 20th century a way forward. It showed that design could be in touch with the deepest roots of European civilisation without being enslaved to old architectural languages. As a result, it transcended its time in a way that very few other works of modernism could manage. Lewerentz was later dropped from the design team, and the two young men fell out over the direction of the project. Their relationship would never recover. Asplund carried on, completing the crematorium and visitors’ centre without Lewerentz’s input. Asplund is buried there, in laconic style. His tombstone reads simply: “His work lives on”. ■ Skogskyrkogården open every day

The lighting buyer at the grand old London homestore Heal’s, aptly named Lucio Longoni, is a happy man. In the past 12 months his sales of pendant lamps, the danglier, more decorative, alternative to the workaday downlight, have doubled. And over the past 18 months sales of the attendant accessories – bulbs and fixtures – have trebled. This is surprising. Pendant lamps are not like their floor and table sisters – you can’t just walk into the shop, grab a couple, take them back home and plug them in. They require thought. They often hang low over furniture, so you need to plan where everything will be, and you need a competent electrician (or to be one yourself) to run the necessary cables to the right spots. Pendant lamps are not new: their closest relative is the chandelier, a total show-off of a way to house dripping stacks of candles before the invention of electricity. So why exactly are they now studding themselves into ceilings everywhere? The first and most obvious reason is the continued dominance of industrial-style interior design, to which a pendant lamp – often without a shade – is a natural partner. Secondly, more people have worked out that if you group a few of them in asymmetric clumps or closely sown rows, they make a room look instantly modern. Third – and this is what makes it easy for interiors stores to cleave notes from wallets – wellknown designers keep creating more and more variations on the theme. The result is a plethora of shapes, styles, colours and materials, not all of which deserve their place at eye level. Pendants are not for the designshy, which is partly why designers enjoy creating them: they can be bold. Benjamin Hubert – whose eponymous studio in London produces furniture, consumer products and cutting-edge lighting – explains that they’re “a sculptural product”: we don’t interact with them as much as, say, a sofa, so “there are fewer usability and ergonomic constraints”. Also, they occupy what is usually empty space: the dead zone between the table and the ceiling. Hang a pendant, and when you walk into the room it’ll be the first thing your eye is drawn to. That can have its drawbacks. A busy design will make the room feel cluttered,

so it’s best to choose either simple, graphic shapes, or shades that use translucent materials. (If you do go for clear shades, keep the wattage low to avoid being continually blinded.) And jokey, whimsical designs – I mean, bowler hats – are fine in a hotel lobby, but can be a little wearing to live with every day. A pendant is like a necklace for a room, so the best designs enhance their surroundings, rather than swamping them. Benjamin Hubert originally made pendants out of concrete, then in 2011 hit upon the idea for his Quarry lamps (from £1,254, benjaminhubert.co.uk), wide, U-shaped cylinders of Carrera marble. The light glows through the stone, illuminating its tracery of dark veins. This approach – a clean shape made from an unusual material – is just right for a modern, minimal aesthetic. Loïc Bard, a French-Canadian designer based in Montreal, uses polished blonde wood in his sleek Bouteille range (C$190; loic-bard. liki.com). The only trouble is they’re so thin they need to hang out in packs, which quickly puts the cost up. Heal’s elegantly upturned goblet – less elegantly called Glass White Pendant (£85, heals.co.uk) – doesn’t have that problem. For something with a bit more visual heft, try the Beat range by Tom Dixon (above; from £275, tomdixon.net). The bright brass interior warmly reflects the light while the simple matt black or white exterior lets you group several of the playful, drum-like shapes – without falling into the hotel-lobby trap.

FEATURES The young visitors A school party gets into the spirit of the Story Museum in Oxford

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> PHOTOGRAPHS MAJA DANIELS

The storysellers The urge to tell stories has been with us for ever â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but it still needs looking after. Tim de Lisle reports on three bright ideas that have become powerhouses of literacy and creativity

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features Chapter 1

The MUSEUM OF STORIES On a summer’s afternoon, Oxford is looking as it does in the imagination, clad in shades of glowing saffron. Tourists are trickling out of Christ Church, the grandest of all the colleges and even more of a draw since its hall landed the plum role of Hogwarts’ dining room in the Harry Potter films. Some of the tourists will know that it also has an older claim to fame in children’s literature: it is where Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was teaching maths when he told a story to amuse three girls in a boat, the daughters of the dean of the college, about the adventures of a child called Alice. As he sat in his rooms in the early 1860s, expanding that story into a book, Dodgson had a view down Pembroke Street. About 70 years later, another don with a sideline as a storyteller could have thrown one of his books into Pembroke Street, had the urge come over him. J.R.R. Tolkien had rooms at Pembroke which came with his job as Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon. One day he was marking exam papers written by 16-year-olds for the School Certificate. Possibly bored, he reached for a sheet of blank paper. “In a hole in the ground”, he wrote, “there lived a hobbit.” If these two weavers of world-famous fantasies could walk down Pembroke Street today, they would be sure of a big surprise. Within a few yards, they would stumble into the Story Museum. Oxford is a city of stories, and a city of museums – the Ashmolean, the Pitt Rivers. But until the 21st century nobody had put the two together. The person who

spotted this was Kim Pickin, a branding executive who had settled in Oxford and brought up three sons there. She had been working on a project about Britishness and what the rest of the world liked or disliked about it. “Children’s literature is such an important aspect of British culture, probably our most loved export,” she says. “It was fascinating to see how ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ is loved in Japan. And children in Africa read ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, and of course lions mean more to them, and snow means less.” Pickin had no experience of working in a museum, let alone creating one, but she had drive and persistence, and she was very much her own person (in the age of the mobile phone, she didn’t have one). Slowly she turned her observation into a mission. I was introduced to her four years ago by a mutual friend who knew that Intelligent Life had a passion for museums. Kim had just got the keys to her new kingdom on Pembroke Street, so she offered us a guided tour. It was an odd place, to say the least: a former sorting office that had also been Oxford’s first automatic telephone exchange, spanning three assorted buildings, pre-Tolkien but post-Dodgson, wedged around a triangular yard. There were still hooks on the walls for the mailbags (Wantage, Abingdon), and a sign in the canteen listing sandwiches (egg mayonnaise, 20p). No two rooms were alike, except that they were all cold. The feel was functional with a twist of eccentric, halfway from an abandoned hospital to a rabbit warren. In the land of stories, a rabbit warren is a des res, but it wasn’t easy to see how this one was going to mutate into a museum. Kim showed us round with a mixture of pride, joy and apology. Four years on, the Story Museum is holding a launch party for an exhibition, “26 Characters”. It’s May 2014 and the entrance on Pembroke Street, once forbiddingly industrial, is now friendly and bright. The foyer is lined with books for sale, so visitors enter through the gift shop. Every guest is handed a blank badge and a Sharpie and told to be a favourite children’s character: becoming someone else, an indispensable component of childhood. I choose Lyra from “His Dark Materials”, a local heroine, albeit from a parallel universe. “We’ve already got one Lyra,” says the woman on the desk. “We gave her a chameleon to be her Pantalaimon.” Crossing the yard, which now has a giant strip cartoon along one wall, the guests gather in a large first-floor room. I find Kim Pickin and inquire about progress. “We’re open six days a week, we have exhibitions and author events.” So is the museum fully launched? “No, we’re at the end of the first chapter. Two-thirds of it isn’t done yet, but we’re using it in its rough state.” A wry smile. “It’s a bit leaky in places.” Soon she is making a speech, thanking authors and supporters; standing at the back, with a sharp gaze and flowing grey hair, is a man who is both – Philip Pullman, the museum’s patron. A class of schoolchildren, aged about seven, sit on a mat at the front, wearing badges, one saying Alice, another Horrid Henry. A smaller boy walks past, blond, bespectacled

and solemn, despite wearing a full-length crocodile suit. The exhibition is about dressing up too. Pickin – who still doesn’t have a mobile – now has a co-director, Tish Francis from the Oxford Playhouse, and a team of ten, mostly young women. They have cajoled 26 children’s authors into picking a favourite character, not their own, and being photographed as them. Pullman is Long John Silver, Malorie Blackman is the Wicked Witch of the West, Charlie Higson is Tolkien’s Boromir, and Francesca Simon is Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. The photographer sounds equally far-fetched – Cambridge Jones – but turns out to be a pseudonym rather than a complete fiction. His portraits are classy as well as engaging, some life-size, others no bigger than a book, each set in a tableau that takes you into the character’s world: Just William’s shed (for Terry Pratchett), Badger’s study (Neil Gaiman), Magwitch’s graveyard (Michael Morpurgo). The designs, by set designers from “Harry Potter” and “Doctor Who”, are

The exhibition catches some of the essence of children’s literature – the playful charm, the vivid sensuality

The enchanted forest Two older visitors settle into Narnia, recreated as part of the Story Museum exhibition “26 Characters”

lively and lavish. Once you pass Pullman and Higson, your path is blocked by a wardrobe. “It might be worth opening it,” says a steward with a glint in his eye. You step through into yet another world dreamed up by an Oxford don: Narnia, recreated with a gleaming carriage that you can sit in, drifts of artificial snow, and a shot of Holly Smale, author of “Geek Girl”, as the White Witch. Writers, it seems, are suckers for witches. The exhibition is light on its feet, yet full of wit and wonder. It catches some of the essence of children’s literature – the playful charm, the vivid sensuality. It makes you want to go back to the books, and lets you start right here, as each tableau includes an iPad, playing extracts read by Olivia Colman or Christopher Eccleston. It turns the strangeness of the building into a strength, with fresh surprises lurking round the many corners. A stainless-steel sink survives from the old canteen and tucked beneath it are the Borrowers, watching “The Simpsons” on their tiny telly. Across the room is a spooky lab for Dr Jekyll (Anthony Horowitz). “That’s where the ceiling is leakiest,” says Pickin, still proudly apologetic. The plan was to close “26 Characters” in November, but there have been more schools wanting to see it than there are slots, and some punters keep coming back: “the record is >

features > seven times so far”. So they will keep an edited version open indefinitely, still with 26 characters, but in smaller spaces. All this is funded largely by private donations, with some help from the Arts Council. Pickin has raised £6m so far, including two hefty gifts at vital moments: £150,000 from an anonymous well-wisher early on, which allowed the museum to be more than a one-woman show, and £2m from another nameless fairy godparent later, which helped secure the building. Pickin also gives credit to the Garfield Weston Foundation, which dispensed tough love, pointing out that she didn’t have a track record in the field and suggesting she pick up experience and put on events in schools before landing herself with premises. Stage two of the funding starts now, aiming at another £9m. All being well, the buildings will be fully converted and modernised with a rooftop walkway, fully accessible to buggies and wheelchairs. The freehold belongs to Merton College and the museum has a lease for 130 years, “which is about as good as it gets in Oxford, unless you’re a college”. The place is so appealing to the child inside the adult that it’s hard to tell if this is a children’s museum or not. “We think of ourselves as aiming at all ages,” Pickin says, “which sounds a bit ridiculous, but we’re trying to give everybody a story-rich experience. The child bit comes in because we’re trying to focus on the stories that everybody can enjoy together. That could be ‘The Iliad’ or ‘The Odyssey’ as well as ‘The Gruffalo’. It’s less likely to be experimental French literature.” As if to illustrate the point, in September there was a surprise birthday party in the middle of the Narnia scene – for a girl of 19. The young visitors don’t just look and learn: they write. In a big room at the top that will one day be a small theatre, there’s a giant wheel of story ideas. The nearest wall, papered with stories way above head height, shows how many

“Strawberries, not spinach” is one of their mantras. The Story Museum is good for you, but not aggressively so people have taken up the invitation. There’s also a dressingup room, equipped with a rack of theatrical costumes, a set of clapperboards and satisfyingly chunky words that allow you to concoct an unlikely title for a story – The Such-andSuch Something of Somewhere. Once dolled up, you sit on a speaking throne, which declaims your title as if by magic. The game relies on microchip technology, but brings an old-school bonus: forced to pick an adjective and two nouns, the kids get a quick grammar lesson, smuggled in like carrots in their pasta sauce. Which chimes with one of Pickin’s guiding mantras: “Strawberries, not spinach. And not chocolate either.” The Story Museum is good for you, but not aggressively so. In the yard is a boat where children can play while their parents have a coffee, and a sofa where anyone can sit even if they haven’t paid for a drink, reflecting a “pet peeve” of Pickin’s from when she used to push her boys round museums: “you’re tired by the time you get there, having lured them and wheeled them.” Still in the yard, there’s a shed where you can fire gobstoppers into the mouths of some of Richmal Crompton’s characters. “We felt we hadn’t fully exploited the catapult possibilities in ‘Just William’. I’m just kind of acting out what I’ve always wanted to do. And still do, after hours.” Pickin runs her team in a collegiate way, and says her litmus test for a project is whether they are having fun. A poster on the wall plugs a new venture: singles evenings. “It’s partly because we have some gorgeous youngsters working on the team who are out looking for a mate. And there was an office conversation about how excruciatingly embarrassing those things can be.” To break the ice, the singles are told to bring a favourite book. “I think we have 20 boys and 20 girls each time, and we have a literary conversation menu, and between that and the cocktails people relax a bit.” It’s for people in their 20s and 30s, “but we’ve been asked if we can do it for older people.” The museum still puts on workshops in schools, and every year it choreographs Alice’s Day, a joint effort by 20 Oxford institutions, including the Bodleian Library. This honours “Alice” as “the birth of modern children’s literature – after ‘Alice’, children’s books became less stuffy and more entertaining”. The speaking throne Visitors can raid the dressing-up rack and compose a story title on a clapperboard, which the throne magically declaims

The big match The Kids’ Lit Quiz world final in Falmouth. The figure in the top hat is its founder, Wayne Mills

The same revolution was sorely needed in museums, and it took a lot longer. There are some famous old museums whose default position for decades was to be half-dead. In the past 30 years, they have woken up to the need to graft the active on to the passive. A new museum has the advantage of being able to begin in the active: the Story Museum doesn’t even have a permanent collection. “It is pretty rough, a lot of it,” Pickin says, “extremely cold and slightly damp in the winter, which would make it impossible to store any treasures.” Like the other quirks of the place, this has been a blessing in disguise. If you’re trying not to be stuffy, it helps to have no stuff. In August, Mark Cousins, a Belfast film-maker whose cv includes organising flash mobs with Tilda Swinton, wrote a piece for the Observer arguing that middle-class arts administrators tended to bring “a deadness” with them. “They get the content right, the ideas, the themes, the politics. But they haven’t a clue about how to embrace things…They don’t understand the warmth and feel of buildings, so well described by Gaston Bachelard in his book ‘The Poetics of Space’…He says that the spaces that we love are ‘especially receptive to becoming’ – welcoming places reduced of inhibitions.” The Story Museum proves the exception to the rule, a middle-class creation that fully embraces the need for a warm welcome. The quote sends me off to look up Bachelard. He was a physicist, a philosopher – and, before that, a postmaster.

Chapter 2

The SPORT OF READING In a quaint old theatre in Falmouth, Cornwall, a tall gentleman in a top hat stands facing the stage, like a conductor. Behind him is an audience of about 100, mostly parents and teachers. Spread out on stage are seven square tables, each bearing a buzzer, each flying a national placard and each occupied by four children, in school uniform, intent, nervous, waiting to pounce. They are aged 10 to 13, which makes for a diverting variety: one of the boys is a hefty six-footer, shoehorned into grey shorts, while a few of the others could almost be his offspring. This is the final of the Kids’ Lit Quiz, the “University Challenge” of children’s books. It is both a world championship and a well-kept secret. The first round consists of film clips, the man in the hat says, and each one will have “a literary aspect to it”. The children have to identify the film, swallow their nerves and hit the buzzer first. Their team will get two points for a right answer, minus one for a wrong one. A still from the first film appears on a rather hazy screen at the back of the stage. Before the picture begins to move, someone buzzes. “New Zealand!” says a deep voice. “‘Shrek’!?” says a high voice. “‘Shrek’ is correct!” says the man in the hat. >

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The same thing happens five more times, prompting the man in the hat to turn to the audience. “Took me about 100 hours to find those clips,” he says, in a tone of outraged delight. “Took the kids six seconds to spot them!” The man is not just the ringmaster and question-setter for the Kids’ Lit Quiz but its founder and driving force. His name is Wayne Mills, and he is four days into retirement from his day job as a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland. His subject was education itself, so he saw many schools. “I would go to assemblies and the prizes would be dished out for sport, sometimes maths and English and so on,” he tells me. “But never ever did I see anyone being recognised for being good at reading. That was the catalyst.” He knew that boys were liable to lose interest in reading, and that, even for a bookworm, it could become a chore as they read less for fun and more for knowledge. “This is the age group where, round about now, reading drops off.” So he targeted the under-14s and turned reading into a competition. The Kids’ Lit Quiz has a telling subtitle: the sport of reading. “I talk about the quiz being a sport because the kids have to try out for the team – you may only see four kids here, but there may have been 80 or 100 trying to get into that team. And they practise, and travel together, and high-five, and so on.” Mills gives them a pep talk about sportsmanship, stressing that even if they finish last, they have done very well, and urging them to applaud each other. “These kids have rarely ever lost. They’re clever kids and they have to learn to lose gracefully.” The Singaporean team, not the best at buzzing, emerge as worldbeaters when it comes to magnanimity. In Falmouth, there is plenty of high-fiving and clenchings of fists. The brainboxes are often every bit as competitive as the jocks, and here they have the chance to show it. For the spectator, the contest has the ebb and flow that a sports fan wants to see. There are enough rounds to sort the sheep from the goats and the hares from the tortoises. The boys buzz more early on – this is the first time they have outnumbered the girls

“Never ever did I see anyone being recognised for being good at reading. That was the catalyst” in the final – and the all-male team from Australia race into the lead, with South Africa, also all-male, on their tail. The four girls representing Britain start slowly, then sneak up into third. Australia pull away, Britain stall: we think it’s all over, but Australia freeze, South Africa fade, New Zealand surge, America flicker, Britain have one big round and keep going. The result is in doubt till the moment the compères, a comedy act called The Two Steves, read it out, agonisingly slowly, as if this were a tv quiz show – which it surely should be. The winners are Team uk, City of London School for Girls, who also won in 2010. In a twist worthy of the back pages, their line-up contains two Australians, an Irish girl – and only one Briton. It all began in 1991, when Mills, then working at the University of Waikato, held the first Kids’ Lit Quiz in Hamilton, with 14 schools taking part. It took him 15 years to reach Britain, which hosted the first world final in Oxford in 2007. How many schools take part now? “Thousands,” he says. “We’re in 11 countries, if you count Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as separate.” He has his eye on India next. The quiz was in Shanghai for five years, but it relies on local volunteers, and the co-ordinator there pulled out. It carries on in Hong Kong, whose team couldn’t come this year because they had gone home to their families in different countries. Mills feels for them: “they got the best score in the world.” In every nation, the questions are Anglocentric. “In New Zealand, we publish about 125 kids’ books a year. You guys publish about 15,000. Why would you want to read any other nation’s books?” Kim Pickin was right about British children’s books. Any team that makes it to the final has come a long way. They will have won their regional quiz, back home in Johannesburg or Toronto, seeing off maybe a dozen other schools over ten rounds of ten questions each. At this stage the answers are written and the questions are concise: “Which novel begins, ‘In a hole in the ground lived…’?” They meet the other regional winners in the nationals, where buzzers appear and the questions mushroom – though that may be the wrong vegetable to invoke, as Mills delights in coming up with questions of many layers. “This author was born in Victorian England,” he will say, “and wrote around 40 books for children. She has been credited with pioneering a new kind of children’s literature, dealing with ‘tough truths’. She had five children herself and was a founder member of the Meet the neighbours Team Canada, from Royal St George’s College, Toronto, with one member (far left) of Team USA, from Sedgwick Middle School in Connecticut, where the 2015 final will be held

The hare and the tortoise Team UK, from City of London School for Girls, started slowly but ended up winning the Kids’ Lit Quiz 2014

Fabian Society. One of her books became a well-loved film, ‘The Railway Children’–” whereupon the contestants will spot the name nestling inside the onion: E. Nesbit. Long, educational and demanding, the questions are designed to favour the brave or the supremely informed, of whom there seem to be plenty. “I was really impressed with the finalists’ knowledge,” Mills says a few days later. “The cream really rises to the top.” And here is another parallel with sport: the quiz unabashedly rewards the best. At the dinner after this year’s final, Mills sat next to a woman from a Toronto bank which was putting C$16m into literacy. “But it all goes to the bottom end,” he says, with a twinge of envy. “We do need to support kids who can’t read, but nobody is doing much for the kids at the top end.” The Kids’ Lit Quiz has had various sponsors over the years, but looks as if it could use a big one, and a pr: in New Zealand and South Africa, it draws tv crews and reporters, but in Britain the silence has been deafening, perhaps because the schools that have done best in it have been private, apart from Cockermouth in Cumbria. We are talking at Mills’s British base in Bracknell, Berkshire, the home of his son-in-law’s parents. A small granddaughter pops a quizzical blonde head round the door. She is at the stage of nursery rhymes and picture books, which form one end of the spectrum for her granddad’s questions. The other end is “The Hunger Games”, which just squeezes in: “I suppose you could say it’s awfully violent, but it’s also

an indictment of society and reality shows, and there’s a degree of black humour.” Just beyond the pale is “The Fault in Our Stars”. “John Green is one of the best teenage authors in the world, but there are instances of sexual behaviour.” The boundary was tested by Robert Muchamore’s “Cherub” series, in which children are trained to spy on terrorists. It begins when the hero, James, is 11 and innocent enough. “But soon he’s 17 and his girlfriend is shagging his best friend on his bed, and someone is videoing it. And kids are reading the whole series.” Still, even Harry Potter gets a girlfriend in the end, doesn’t he? “Yes, but we don’t see him consummate it.” Mills writes every question himself, charging only expenses and a fee for the rights. For his 23 years’ service to reading, he has been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. Even more usefully, the quiz has a celebrity alumna: in the New Zealand team of 2009, which finished second, was Ella Yelich-O’Connor, better known as Lorde, who had a global hit last year with her song “Royals”. The trip to the world final in Johannesburg was the first time she had been overseas. Now that he is retired, Mills wants to put the quiz on a more businesslike footing. At the 2015 world final in Connecticut, the first to be held in America, he will launch the Kids’ Lit Quiz app for Apple and Android (99 cents). “It’ll have 100 questions at level one, 100 at level two, and once you get through, the world-final questions. And no multiple choice. If you don’t know the answer, you have to go and read the book.” >

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Chapter 3

The CRUNCH OF REALITY Back to Oxford – a very different Oxford. At the Story Museum, Kim Pickin called the location “a good mix of town and gown”. At Oxford Spires Academy, three miles away in Cowley, it’s more a case of town and veil. This is a co-ed state secondary with 1,100 pupils, many of Asian descent. It bears the scars of decades of political wrangling. It has been a grammar school, a comprehensive, a foundation school and now an academy, answerable to Whitehall rather than the city council. It is outstanding at one thing: growing writers. Wayne Mills had said you could tell a lot about a school by its library, “and often in Britain it’s a broom cupboard”. At Oxford Spires, the library is the dominant building, light, airy and large enough to hold an event. On a warm July evening, it hosts the launch of “Wings”, a paperback anthology of writing by the school’s First Story group. The book is on sale for £10, so I buy it and read a couple of poems – “Wings” itself, by Maah-Noor Ali, and “For My Future Lover”, by Esme Partridge. One is a riff on the myth of Icarus, the other, as its name suggests, a future love poem ( “It takes everything in me to wait for you”). Both are vivid, succinct and touching. First Story is a charity that “supports and inspires creativity, literacy and confidence in challenging uk secondary schools”. “Challenging” means the school must be in the bottom third in terms of the pupils’ “postcode affluence”. First Story sends in a writer-in-residence to spend an afternoon a week coaxing teenagers to write. At Oxford Spires, for six years now, it has been Kate Clanchy, poet, novelist and former teacher. She is standing in the library with Katie Waldegrave, another ex-teacher and the co-founder of First Story. “This school wins all the prizes,” Waldegrave says. Clanchy looks abashed, but only briefly. “We do win everything,” she says, “the Foyle’s, the Betjeman, the Tow-

er...” When I check the Foyle’s Young Poets of the Year, open to 11-to-18s, Esme Partridge, 16, is the winner. The Christopher Tower poetry prize, run from Christ Church but open to all British 16-to-18s, was won in 2013 by Azfa Awad, 18, an Oxford Spires student, returning today as the Oxford youth ambassador for poetry. When the shortlist for the Betjeman poetry competition for 10-to-13s appears, two of the three nominees will be from Oxford Spires. Teenagers mill about, raiding bowls of crisps. Some are in purple school v-necks, others in jeans, many in hijabs.Then everyone sits down and the principal, Sue Croft, makes a speech. “I commend every word in this,” she says, brandishing the book. “Such a powerful, emotive, brilliant publication. I’m so proud of it. Lots of great things have happened to Oxford Spires, but the two best are First Story and Kate Clanchy.” The kids go up on stage to read their work. Writers are often made of opposing forces, shyness and showmanship, and you can see that here. Maah-Noor Ali is quiet and quick. Jasmine Burgess, twice a Betjeman finalist, is more measured; at 13, she already has stage presence. Esme Partridge, clear, good at pauses, gets a laugh before she starts by saying “this is a poem I wrote in the night, feeling far too beautiful and too clever for my own good probably.” You believe her when she comes to the line, “it takes a lot of boy to scare me.” Creative-writing exercises can easily be hazy, but these kids’ work has the crunch of reality. It homes in on home, on family and ethnicity. Half the pupils in the school have grown up with English as a second language. The first reader calls himself “a very proud Nigerian”; others mention Tanzania, Bangladesh and Hungary. One girl dedicates her poem “to a lovely lady who was my counsellor when I had depression”. Another writes about “my dad having a really bad case of pneumonia”. A third reads “a letter to my dad who passed away”. Her voice is calm and piercing. “I sometimes feel cold,” she says, “as though part of me is missing.” Oxford Spires is exceptional, as its trophies attest, but it is only one of 50 schools that have a First Story group. Each one produces an anthology, which features every member of the group. At First Story’s office near the Tower of London, 150 anthologies sit proudly on the shelves: around 2,500 teenagers have become published authors. All this began in 2007 when Katie Waldegrave, then teaching in a challenging school near Heathrow under the Blair-era Teach First scheme for graduates, met William Fiennes, author of “The Snow Geese” and later of a series of walks for this magazine. “We were introduced by mutual friends,” Waldegrave says. “I was a teacher interested in writing, he was a writer interested in teaching.” Fiennes had formed a writing group at the American School in St John’s Wood. “He was talking about what it did for those students, how they became more confident. But that’s a very Homing in on home Pupils from the First Story group at Oxford Spires, where half the pupils have grown up with English as a second language

“For My Future Lover” Esme Partridge, 16, reads her poem at Oxford Spires school. A member of the school’s First Story group, she was a Foyle’s Young Poet of the Year in 2013

swanky private school.” She should know: her father, Lord Waldegrave, a Tory minister in the 1990s, is the provost of Eton. “I was saying it would never happen at a school like mine. And to Will’s eternal credit he said ‘let’s give it a go’.” So they did, on a Wednesday afternoon. Fiennes gave his time, unpaid; Waldegrave, conscious that staying late usually meant football or detention, lured the kids with “a lot of bribery – biscuits, and having a famous person helps”. Even if they hadn’t heard of him? “Yes, but they could Google him.” Left to their own devices, the kids didn’t write about what they knew, they wrote about what they had read. “It used to be Harry Potter, now it’s vampires. At my school, we didn’t have any white students in the group, nobody had a name like Jane or Mary, but they were writing stories about Harry and Jane and boarding school.” Drawing them back to reality meant getting them to put down their pens. “Kids are keener to talk than write, as most of us are, so we would get them talking about their lives and say ‘that, there, is a story’. Will was brilliant at that, showing them there was a story under their nose.” This took time, so they decided that the arrangement needed to run for a school year. They set up as a charity, appointed a board, spread the word and sent writers into eight schools. “We were probably really naive. We thought we can just raise a bit of money, I’ll send some e-mails…” Would they have done it if they had known what they were getting into? “Probably not, but I’m very glad I did.” First Story now employs nine people, “mostly parttime, so we add up to about five”. One of them is a paid intern, Jay Bhadricha, who was a member of an early First Story group and went on to read English and history at Exeter. Just

as boys are usually outnumbered by girls among the young writers, so Jay now finds himself the only man in the office. Over the years Waldegrave has learned which planets have to be aligned for the system to work: “It needs a teacher who loves the idea of it, ideally two, and the head teacher, and the head of department. Schools are complicated places.” After getting the writer free at first, the schools now pay about a third of the actual cost of £13,000, with the rest covered by private donations and an Arts Council grant. First Story has an annual budget of just under £700,000. Waldegrave, who achieved her ambition in 2013 with a biography, “The Poets’ Daughters”, wants to write more, so she is stepping back. The new director is Monica Parle, a Texan with a big smile who has been on board for four years after working in publishing. As my tour ends, what strikes me is the genes these three projects share, beyond banging the drum for literacy. Each started as just a spark in the mind of a thoughtful person. They all turned that thought into action, even though they had no experience of the field. They all showed grit as well as getup-and-go. The three projects run on a wily blend of idealism and pragmatism, warmth and steel. And they are all inspiring. First Story runs a residential summer school, with one or two kids from each group. This year they spent five days in rural Somerset. “We drive down in coaches,” Waldegrave says, “and they’re absolutely silent, homesick.” But they soon warm up. As Will Fiennes put it on Twitter: “60 teenagers, writing. Also: water fights.” While she was there, Waldegrave got into a debate with an inner-city kid about a sheep. “He was pretty sure it was a pig.” Not only was he unused to the country: he clearly hadn’t read many children’s books. n

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Good riddance I

t is just possible that the most important guinea worm in history has already found its home. Its host does not know it yet, but inside his or her body this long white parasite is reproducing and growing. Through the next few months, as millions of her ancestors have done before, she will feed and strengthen. Then slowly, excruciatingly, she will break through the skin of her host’s foot and release her larvae. Humans and guinea worms have coexisted like this for millennia. The worm is described in ancient Egyptian texts, and its calcified remains have been found in mummies. The Rod of Asclepius, the snake wrapped around a staff that is the symbol of medicine, is believed to be a depiction of the only mechanism for speeding its exit: twirling it around a stick. Yet of all the hundreds of millions of worms that have burrowed their way out of African feet, this one is special: it could well be the last. In 1986 there were 3.5m cases of guinea worm. Last year, there were 148. This year, up to late September, just 80 had been recorded: 68 in South Sudan, two in Ethiopia, nine in Chad and one in Mali. For only the second time ever, we could be about to eradicate a disease in humans. Throughout human history, guinea-worm disease has

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been a fact of life across sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. It received its common name from European traders who found it endemic in west Africa – and were liable to return with it themselves. Its Latin name, Dracunculus medinensis, which it gained in the 19th century, shows that it was equally prevalent on the opposite side of Africa and beyond: the name means “fiery little serpent of Medina”. Whether on the Arabian Peninsula or the Gold Coast, in 2000ad or 2000bc, the guinea worm has always been a curse. Whole villages would go down with it, year after year, the farmers unable to farm, the children unable to go to school. This is a disease without a cure, and with a particularly pernicious life cycle. From microscopic beginnings, living inside water fleas, the guinea worm enters humans through infected water supplies. For a year it grows inside its host. We normally think of a disease as something caused by an unseen agent, like the virus that lies behind the alarming spread of Ebola. But a disease – a dis-ease – can be anything that causes pain or dysfunction. When this worm emerges, it is a metre long and by this stage in its life cycle it may well feel closer to a wildlife attack than a disease. Bursting through the flesh, usually the foot, it creates an intensely painful boil – so painful that the >

GETTY, SWISS TROPICAL AND PUBLIC HEALTH INSTITUTE

A generation ago, guinea-worm disease was bringing misery to millions; now it is down to two cases a week. Its nemesis is Donald Hopkins, who has already helped to see off smallpox. He tells Tom Whipple how to eradicate a disease

In his sights Dr Donald Hopkins with a jar of guinea worms

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> most natural thing to do is put your foot in water to cool it. At which point it releases its larvae to begin the journey again. It is crippling, both literally and economically. The us Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (cdc) describes it as “a disease of poverty and also a cause of poverty” because of the disability it brings. “Parents with active guinea-worm disease might not be able to care for their children,” the cdc says. “The worm often comes out of the skin during planting and harvesting season. Therefore, people might also be prevented from working in their fields and tending their animals.” So people stay at subsistence level or below, without the education or resources that would rid them of the disease. The worm feeds on this vicious cycle as much as it feeds on its human host. But there is a way to break it.

n 1980 Dr Donald Hopkins, then at the cdc, recognised that guinea worm had one weakness: its reliance on humans. It cannot reproduce outside an animal, and no other animal reliably carries it. So getting rid of this disease does not require expensive vaccinations or sophisticated laboratories. Stop humans putting their infected feet in water, get those living in infected areas to filter water – often with just a cloth – and you stop the worm. Hopkins’s realisation came at a time when disease control had just claimed its greatest victory. Thanks to a massive effort, involving teams working across countries and continents, smallpox had been eradicated. It is still one of

When it is a metre long it emerges, usually from the foot. It creates an intensely painful boil – so painful that the most natural thing to do is put your foot in water to cool it the greatest feats of public-health policy. “It was a tremendously exciting time,” says Hopkins, who headed the cdc’s Sierra Leone smallpox operation 1967-69. To have been partly responsible for eradicating one disease and largely responsible for the near-eradication of another is extraordinary. Hopkins was born in the deep South in 1941, when it was still segregated. One of ten children of a carpenter, he knew he wanted to be a doctor from a young age. It was during a trip abroad that he decided on his specialism. “I was playing the tourist in Egypt in 1961 when I saw all these children and adults get flies around their eyes and have problems with their eyes – I now know it was trachoma. I went to medical school determined I would work on tropical disease.” In Sierra Leone, where he was sent on the global smallpox programme, he found his cause. Rushing to infected areas before the disease spread, he and his team pioneered

getty, corbis

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rapid-response tactics, encircling outbreaks with vaccination programmes and isolating patients, often within hours of the first reports. “I can’t tell you how motivating it was for us,” he says, “to see how we were saving people’s lives.” Smallpox is a terrible disease. As with guinea worm, the earliest evidence of it probably comes from the Egyptians: its tell-tale pustules were found on the mummified skin of Pharaoh Ramses V. Unlike guinea worm, it is a killer; spread by a virus, it is credited with half a billion deaths in the 20th century. Yet this scourge of humanity was eradicated in just a few years. Flushed with success, Dr Hopkins turned his energies and the same techniques to the next eradicable disease. Guinea worm was an obvious target: because of its unusual life cycle it merely required an effective education programme and water filtration, coupled with speedy isolation of infected people. All of which makes Hopkins’s job sound far too easy. For a disease to be eradicable there are certain useful preconditions. “You want it to be found only in humans,” says Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (lshtm). “If there is an animal reservoir you have to deal with that too,” he says, from his central London office, above the cellars where thousands of mosquitos are bred for research, some species fed directly from the blood of laboratory assistants. Ideally, you would also like to know where the disease is at all times. “When people are infectious, what fraction is clinically apparent? How many go on to develop symptoms

The worm has turned OPPOSITE After a year’s gestation, the worm emerges. above Sufferers are encouraged to put their feet in clean water to hasten its departure instead of infecting drinking water

at all?” With guinea worm, infectiousness coincides with the worm emerging, so it is obvious. There is another vital criterion by which guinea worm does not do so well: it is just not quite serious enough. “It sounds brutal, but from an epidemiological perspective you want people to be really sick,” says Edmunds. “You can’t have them pottering around going to work.” This goes some way to explaining why smallpox was the first disease to fall: it occurred only in humans, there was a vaccine, infectious people were symptomatic and – crucially – they were so sick that they were bedridden. But even these factors are merely helpful prerequisites. The real challenge of eradicating a disease is seldom purely medical. When embarking on an eradication programme – a battle that is currently being waged against polio, measles, mumps, rubella and the tropical bacterial infection yaws – the teams involved tend to know in theory exactly what needs to be done. In practice, although some scientific problems will emerge along the way, the barriers they face are more likely to be political, cultural and logistical. It is no coincidence that the countries where guinea worm remains are some of the most unstable and inaccessible. For all the team’s scientific knowledge, Donald Hopkins says, “We are dealing with human beings. They are in traditional, >

y the mid-1990s, when Dr Hopkins says he had naively hoped guinea worm would be long gone, Sudan had probably the least conducive politics, culture and logistics in the world for health workers. In the south, where a huge reservoir of the disease remained, a civil war was entering its 12th year. No aid agencies were reaching patients. With brutal bush warfare between the Muslim government and Christian separatists, complicated by disputes over oil and an insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army on the Ugandan border, worm-education programmes were hardly a priority. By now, though, Hopkins had the backing of Jimmy Carter’s foundation, the Carter Centre, which had hired him to lead its guinea-worm programme. In 1995 Carter flew to Nairobi to meet the head of the south Sudanese forces, John Garang. “He said he was getting ready to go to Khartoum,” Hopkins says. “Before he went, he asked Garang whether, if he could persuade the northern government to agree to a ceasefire in order to get health workers in, the southern forces would also accept. Garang said yes. The speculation is that he only did so because he thought it unlikely the north would agree; the dry season was approaching and that was the best time for fighting.” This was enough for Carter, who left for Khartoum.

Presidential relief Jimmy Carter in Danchira, Ghana, in 1989. Six years later his intervention in Sudan led to the Guinea Worm Ceasefire

On the way, his plane stopped in Nairobi to pick up a cnn correspondent, Gary Striker. “In Khartoum, Carter was able to let President Bashir know that cnn was there and that one way or another there was going to be a news story,” Hopkins says. “He could either hold up Bashir and his government as obstructive and warmongers, or as having agreed to this wonderful thing. Of course they agreed to that wonderful thing.” An uneasy, but unprecedented, six months of peace followed, in which health workers scrabbled to reach all of the country before time ran out. It became known in Sudan as the Guinea Worm Ceasefire. It is easy to see why, despite independence, South Sudan remains one of the last redoubts of the disease – and not only because almost as soon as the war with the north ended a new conflict in the south began. In 2010, just before the referendum on independence, I travelled with members of the health ministry to a town to the east of the capital, Juba, to inspect and re-stock one of the clinics they were due to inherit. On paper theirs was a shiny new department, ready to offer whatever help it could. On paper, though – more specifically on our maps – there were also roads. For two days, our Land Cruiser shuddered along dirt tracks and ditches. By night we used the indicators – finding a vehicle that worked was enough of an achievement, let alone

Magnum, Alamy

> suspicious communities.” Reaching them often requires not just medical, but political intervention. And the most dramatic example of that has been guinea worm.

features one with working headlights – to illuminate the edge of the poorly demarcated road, beyond which lay minefields. By day we continued often at less than walking pace, rolling in and out of man-deep potholes like a fishing boat in a storm. When we arrived at our destination, a member of our party was beaten over the head by a man wielding a plank of wood. There was no particular reason for the attack. We had travelled just 60km from Juba – in a country 1,000km wide. In the face of this, it is a brave health worker who orders people in pain to keep their feet out of stagnant ponds. That presupposes there is even a health worker to do the ordering. In countries coming out of civil wars the stock of qualified clinicians is often rather stretched. To give an idea of the scale of the problem, at independence, South Sudan had 19 registered midwives covering a country of 10m. The woman I travelled with was very senior in the newly formed health ministry, and tasked with rectifying this. Her first target was superstition. Arriving in one village, I was told to avoid a nearby hill because bad spirits lived there and anyone who walked on it died. I nodded solemnly, trying to be sensitive to the local culture. My companion scolded the people for being silly and pledged to climb the hill that evening. However shrewd, she was also the product of a country where there had been little in the way of a schooling system in 30 years. So although her courage and dedication were astonishing, her scientific knowledge was in many areas pre-Enlightenment. That night we camped in the bush and ours was the only light for 30km around. As foot-long stick insects swayed out of the gloom and hulking great beetles buzzed clumsily towards the bare bulb, it felt as if the whole of the jungle was coming to greet us. There was a clear sky and I stepped out to look at the stars, explaining we did not see them like this in Britain. “Why is that?” my companion asked. “Is it because they are farther away?”

uch like an insurgency against an occupying army, a campaign against any disease relies on the co-operation of the population. The way Donald Hopkins achieves his results differs from country to country, but the principle is the same: encourage the locals to do the job for themselves. “The disease is the world’s problem, but at a local level it’s their problem too,” he says. “They don’t want to have these diseases, and we need to show them that they don’t need to. Ultimately it’s not about someone having to fly out to detect every case; what we need is for local reaction to be immediate. If someone has guinea worm, they need to make themselves known and be isolated.” The Carter Centre’s goal is to work with national health ministries to train local volunteers to continue their work – they have trained 30,000 in South Sudan alone. In an ideal world, Hopkins and his colleagues would just co-ordinate the initial approach and then sit in their headquarters in Atlanta, collating the results. If that sounds like the sort of consensual aid pro-

Local hero A health worker in Niger spreads the word about how to avoid contracting guinea worm

gramme that would make a marvellous case study in a charity brochure, it is worth pointing out that Hopkins does not much care how this co-operation is achieved. It could be because people are enthused by the eradication programme; it could also be because the government of South Sudan is offering $100 to anyone who turns themself in – or their neighbour. It is working. This year only a fraction of South Sudan’s 68 cases were not caught in the first 24 hours – and it looks set to go the way of Ivory Coast, Egypt and Nigeria, all declared guinea worm free. Hopkins’s real worry is the swathe of the Sahara which after the Arab spring has become ungovernable. Mercifully, so far, the eradication programme’s problems with Islamism have been restricted to instability. If only the same were true of a far more high-profile eradication programme: polio. Viewed on a graph, polio looks as if it should be vying with guinea worm as the next disease to be eradicated. Recorded cases have dropped from hundreds of thousands, in 125 countries, in 1990, to fewer than 500 last year – and in just three countries. But nobody is talking about imminent eradication. Those three countries are Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. And polio persists in Pakistan largely because of something no one could possibly have foreseen when the programme began: the death of Osama bin Laden. On May 2nd 2011, two stealth helicopters entered >

> Pakistani airspace, en route to Abbottabad. It was the beginning of Operation Neptune Spear; within hours Osama bin Laden would be dead. Barack Obama was confident enough to risk such a raid thanks to the assurances of the cia, which was pretty sure that bin Laden was there. A team had collected dna samples from family members inside the compound – by pretending to be offering vaccinations. When the details of this covert programme emerged, all health workers in Pakistan became, by association, suspected spies. Taliban commanders in two districts vowed to use violence to enforce a boycott of polio vaccinations until drone strikes stopped. They have been true to their word. Polio has been the major beneficiary. “Right now in polio eradication the absolutely dominant issue is this political one,” says Dr Heidi Larson, an anthropologist who works with the lshtm. “We simply aren’t going to have eradication confirmed with this fountain of the disease coming out of northern Pakistan.” International health programmes are often met with suspicion. In the West middle-class parents are most likely to oppose vaccination, on the false ground that it causes autism – a campaign of misinformation that has stalled the 40-year measles-eradication programme. Larson works for the lshtm’s Vaccine Confidence Project, applying an anthropologist’s

Zero infections can never become 80, but for 80 to become 3.5m just takes time and bad luck skills to monitor and combat public concerns. She says such reactions are not surprising. “There’s something about the nature of these programmes. They are population-wide, governmentdriven and often involve a needle. For anyone with issues with distrust, or control, or governments, that breeds suspicion.” For all the cross-cultural opposition to eradication programmes, in the Islamic world there has been a deeply worrying new development. “There have been 50 or 60 people killed, explicitly targeted because of their involvement in the polio programme,” Larson says. “That’s a new phenomenon, we have never had violence before.” Experience has shown that, as a country approaches elimination, getting rid of the final few cases can be wearing. It is, more than anything, about patience and tenacity. You keep going, and going, until the tally stands at zero. Zero is a number that, in disease terms, is arguably further from 80 (the number of guinea-worm cases so far this year) than 80 is from 3.5m. Zero infections can never become 80, but for 80 to become 3.5m just takes time and bad luck. In polio, having come within a comparable distance of zero, Professor Edmunds now thinks there is a chance they might not even succeed, that this final stage may be too much. “It is apparent that as we get close to the polio endgame,” he says, “in some ways it gets further and further away.”

onald Hopkins is far from complacent that the end is nigh for the guinea worm. He still goes into the field several times a year and monitors progress from his home office in Chicago, where a statue of the Hindu smallpox goddess (no longer so busy) sits alongside a glass jar containing a preserved guinea worm. At the age of 73, he is not planning his retirement; there have already been too many setbacks. Some have been simply bad luck. “In 2006 a young Koranic student walked from south Mali to an area around Kidal, in the north,” he says, his low soft voice occasionally slipping into the deep-South vowels of his childhood. “There had not been guinea worm there for a generation, but a year later all these people began going down with the disease. It was one of three or four dramatic examples of a single person contaminating the water supply and giving rise to 60, 70, 80 cases. That is what keeps me up at night.” In Chad, there is a worry that the campaign’s entire modus operandi – that health workers need only rid humans of the disease – could be subverted. The water fleas that carry the guinea-worm larvae can exist in fish, but cannot reproduce in them. They can reproduce in warm-blooded mammals, but the only ones into which they reliably find their way are humans – largely, it turns out, because we drink from vessels. “The way dogs drink water, lapping it up with their tongues, causes the water fleas to flee,” Hopkins says. On the Chari river in Chad, however, at the end of the dry season, there is a mass harvesting of fish, which are left out to dry. Their entrails are discarded, to be eaten by dogs. “If dogs eat uncooked fish entrails,” Hopkins goes on, “then the fish can serve to concentrate a lot of these infected larvae. And that way the infection can be passed sporadically to humans.” Spotting this is detective work in itself – it takes a year for an infected dog to show symptoms, which would ordinarily be missed in any case, and another year for any humans it infects to show up in the Carter Centre’s data. This is another difficulty of eradicating guinea worm: time spent fighting a disease should not be measured in human years, but in the disease’s lifespan. With smallpox, the incubation period was two weeks, and every fortnight Hopkins could collect data and assess progress. With guinea worm it takes a year to know if you have been successful – or to learn if a missed case has infected the pond that supplies a town’s water. In these terms, Hopkins’s decades fighting guinea worm are the same as just over a year spent tackling smallpox. “I started this in October 1980,” he says of the job that has occupied most of his working life. “I don’t think I would have been courageous enough if I had thought we would still be going now.” For all his caution, he allows himself a moment of hope. “This could be the year. We can’t be sure yet, but we can pray. Then, 12 months after the last case, we can exhale.” And when that day comes, Donald Hopkins, the man at the centre of two of the greatest enterprises in the history of human health, will be able to retire. n

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Germany memories of a nation Sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan With support from Salomon Oppenheimer Philanthropic Foundation

Accompanies a major series on Radio 4

A 600-year history in objects Until 25 January 2015 britishmuseum.org #MemoriesOfANation Porcelain rhinoceros based on Dürer’s print. Made by Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, Meissen factory, 1730. Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: Herbert Jäger. 1953 Volkswagen Beetle Export Type 1. National Motor Museum.

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THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST

Vinyl records are like kisses: you never forget your first. In our photo essay, DEAN BELCHER captures a formative relationship. LAURA BARTON asks the questions

rainy Friday afternoon in a photographic studio in north-east London, and out through the door and all the way down the wet staircase carries the sound of sunshine: Althea & Donna’s reggae song “Uptown Top Ranking”, Britain’s number one for a week in 1978. “This”, says Dean Belcher, standing beside the turntable, “was the first single I ever bought.” The room falls into a respectful silence. “Love is all I bring,” Althea & Donna announce, “inna me khaki suit and ting.” Over two decades, Belcher’s photography has often intersected with the world of music — with portraits of musicians as well as intimate depictions of the uk Mod scene, of which he has long been part. Recently, between longer-term projects, he came up with the idea of photographing people with the first vinyl record they ever bought. He put out an appeal on social media,

placed adverts in a couple of local record stores, and was delighted when 40 members of the public agreed to be photographed. When seven of them dropped out, he was even happier: it left him with a fortuitous number for those familiar with their revolutions per minute. The 33 display a diverse range of musical tastes, from the raw punk throttle of a Black Flag record preserved in its plastic sleeve to a wornlooking copy of “It’s the Same Old Song” by the Weathermen — a violin-heavy cover of the Four Tops’ hit, recorded in 1971 by Jonathan King. There are children’s albums, compilations, soundtracks, records sponsored by Ribena, 45s with price stickers still attached or fastidious biro in the top lefthand corner. One woman remembered her 78 as the music she and her husband once courted to, another cried when Belcher played her copy of Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes”. There are even three generations of one family — a mother, a daughter, >

Trish B, 34, psychologist Michael Jackson: Bad

“I completely loved everything he did. I still do. Though he tailed off a little towards the end. I would have been seven when I bought this. I’d watched the videos on ‘Top of the Pops’ on a Thursday night and my favourite was ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’, where he’s pursuing a girl along the street. I did a lot of dancing round the living room with my little brothers to this record. I probably would have been trying to moonwalk on the carpet”

Nellie Dewhurst, 95, court dressmaker (RETIRED) Vera Lynn: It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie

“I bought it on a Friday, payday, after work, from Woolworth’s in Brixton. It cost six old pence. She has a lovely tone to her voice, and it brings back good memories from when I was young and courting with my husband. We were childhood sweethearts – we first met when we were three years old, and we got married in the middle of the war. We were married 54 years”

features Coco Khan, 26, journalist Black Flag: Nervous Breakdown

“It feels really alien to me now, this music. It feels really far away. Then I was 15 and thought ‘Yeah man, punk for ever.’ I bought it because it was their first EP and I thought it was cool. But it’s before Henry Rollins joined the band, so it was the first Black Flag song that I didn’t like. I didn’t listen to it that many times”

Mark “Monkey” Raison, 44, civil servant Keith Michell: Captain Beaky and His Band

“It brings back memories of my family. I was ten, my dad was driving us to see our grandparents and it was on the car radio. I still remember that journey. I remember his red Vauxhall Cavalier and going to the petrol station and how it always seemed to be hot in the car, and you’d feel sick. The smell of heat and plastic and my dad’s cigarettes”

> and a granddaughter – each with their own distinct choice, stamped with the times, but still displaying a shared passion. This afternoon Belcher is shooting Paul Vache, a personal trainer and dedicated steampunk from nearby Leytonstone. Vache has brought his copy of Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall”, and Belcher plays it right through while he cavorts for the camera. “I bought it from a little stall in Walthamstow market,” Vache says. “I didn’t get pocket money but I somehow saved up enough.” He kept his savings in “a Benson & Hedges box”. The title track begins to play. “When the world is on your shoulder,” Jackson sings, “gotta straighten up your act and boogie down.” “Listen to it and think about what was going on at the time,” Belcher instructs Vache, and the effect of the music is tangible. “It was a certain time of my life,” Vache says. “It’s sad as well. Bless my mum, she didn’t really understand anything. She was 16 when she had me, things were hard for her – I understand more now I’m older. And there’s a lot of stuff I don’t bring up, I just get on with it, but then, this record was sort of my medicine.” Belcher’s own love of vinyl began at an early age, in the days when “you would buy what was on ‘Top of the Pops’, or what you read about in Record Mirror. You’d go to Our Price Records, spend three hours in there and come out with three singles and an album.” He bought “Uptown Top Ranking” when he was 12 years old and flush from helping out on his father’s milk round. The next year he bought his first album, Plastic Bertrand’s “AN 1”. “I went with my dad to Boots in town,” he remembers, recalling a distant age when even a high-street chemist sold >

features Daisy Bowen, 13, student Pulp: Different Class

“I got a record player for my 13th birthday in April, a small orange portable one. I had this on my iPod beforehand — my dad liked Pulp and put it on for me. I love Pulp because their songs are so story-like and their lyrics are quite poetic. Plus Jarvis Cocker is just awesome. Since then I’ve bought a lot of the Smiths and Morrissey. It’s always nice to go looking for records — mainly I go with my mum to the record shops in Islington. And I have one friend who’s into records too. I like how on a record it sounds more like the music is coming from the musician, not transferred from somewhere else”

Martin Black, 45, magazine production manager B.A. Robertson: Bang Bang

“I’ve got every record I’ve ever bought. I keep them all in my room, my man room, jumbled up in order of genre. I bought this when I was about ten. I was a fairly average ten-year-old, not particularly boisterous, not particularly wallflowery. I don’t remember any of my friends being into music, but I suppose I must have heard it on the charts and liked it. I bought it in W.H. Smith in Ealing. They had a big spiral staircase; I remember going down there and seeing all the records behind the counter. I hadn’t played it for years. It’s not the greatest of songs, but it’s nice to hear it again. I remember my next two records, too: the second was The Police, ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’, and my third was The Clash, ‘London Calling’”

> records. “And he said ‘Why d’you want this? It’s all in French!’ And the record was rubbish. But it was because the cover folded out, and I could put it on my wall.” Belcher’s reverence for these records extends not just to the songs but to the peculiar power, the electric, near-conductive force music can exert in someone’s life. There was a particularly transformative moment in his own early teens: “I used to knock about with this guy Paul, who wanted to be a Radio 1 dj. He was the only person I knew who had subscriptions to Sounds and nme, and he had twin decks in his bedroom and he used to make radio programmes. I was with him, reading a feature in nme about Mods, and we said ‘Shall we be Mods?’ And that day I went home and I put on my best clothes – which was my school uniform – and suddenly my Chopper was no longer Easy Rider, it was my scooter.” Belcher lost touch with Paul a few years later. “I heard he went on to do local radio and hospital radio,” he says, “however it was never his main career — as far as I know he carried on in engineering after his apprenticeship.” Alongside each portrait, Belcher has photographed every record by itself. “Despite being an inanimate object,” he says, “they all seem to have a life of their own.” As I make my way through the pictures, I can’t help but agree. Just like its owner, each piece of vinyl seems to carry its own expression, its own weather and wear. And this is the joy — that there in the creases and smudges, the torn sleeves and scratches, lies a story, and a magic. n

PAUL VACHE, 47, PERSONAL TRAINER MICHAEL JACKSON: OFF THE WALL

“It was a nice day. It was the first day me and my brother were allowed to go and buy something. I bought this and ‘Rapper’s Delight’ [by the Sugarhill Gang]. I’d heard Michael Jackson on the radio, but I’d never heard ‘Rapper’s Delight’ till I went to the stall that day and they were playing it. I’d already got ‘Off the Wall’ but I said ‘I’ll have that as well!’”

FEATURES

DANIEL RACHEL, 45, AUTHOR ADAM AND THE ANTS: KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER

“I bought it when I was 12. I think it was the year after it was released — I had to save up my paperround money. I had desperately wanted it — I was obsessed with Adam and the Ants. I bought it in Birmingham town centre and then I got the 37 bus back to Solihull. It’s a 40-minute journey and I’d studied every lyric by the time I got home. I had to go into the lounge to use the record player, and I wasn’t allowed to put the stylus on the record — I had to ask my dad to do it for me. Every time it got to the end of a side, I would call him to ask him to turn it over. Sometimes he would come and sometimes he wouldn’t”

Justina Dewhurst-Richens, 44, artist Dexys Midnight Runners: Geno

“We used to go to the fruit-and-veg market by Clapham Junction every Saturday, and there was an independent record shop nearby. I asked my mum if we could go. I’d saved up my money and I stood and counted it all out: 1p, 2p, half-pennies. I was ten, and I could just about see over the counter. I was brought up in a house with good music — lots of psychedelia and blues and R’n’B. But no soul. And so I think it was the horns that captured me. My parents had always told me that if you bought a single you should listen to the B-side as well. And the B-side to Geno was ‘Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache’. That blew my head off. It’s a cover of a northern-soul track by Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon, but I didn’t know that. It just got me. I’d never heard anything like it. I used to jump up and down on the armchair to it. When Dean was taking the pictures, he put the B-side on and I had this involuntary foot-tapping. A few years later when I was 13 or 14, I found northern soul and I stayed with it. So I blame Kevin Rowland for the whole of my life”

Susan Dewhurst, 67, milliner Lead Belly

“Ah, now, music and me. I used to go to Eel Pie Island, and the kids there played records I’d never heard. And my cousin was married to Gene Vincent, who would play lots of records I’d never heard before. I went to art school in Croydon, and I probably first heard Lead Belly in the common room. I got it for 12 and six [62p] in Woolworth’s when I was 16, on my lunch break from my Saturday job in a boutique. I bought it because it was the roots of what we listened to. It went backwards. And I liked the rawness. It’s enlightening and melancholic and it has a life of its own. It’s like opening up another door. Lots of records open up doors, and that record opens up doors to right the way back, to so many things that aren’t there any more – things, people, attitudes”

FEATURES

PATRICK LEE, 50, HOUSING MANAGER BOOMTOWN RATS: RAT TRAP

“I had a friend called Robbie. We used to go to a youth-club disco in a church hall in Dundalk, and gradually they introduced some punk and new wave. I was brought up in a small Catholic community, so this was quite rebellious. One day Robbie said ‘Have you heard the new Boomtown Rats single?’ I listened to it in the shop. This was the first time I’d gone into a record shop by myself. I was just blown away. It was quite different to most punk songs — it was quite melodic, and there was saxophone, and a keyboard player who always dressed in pyjamas. I listened to it non-stop, 25 times a day”

features

Steve Piper, 44, social worker MADNESS: ONE STEP BEYOND

“I was 11 and I was absolutely madly in love with ‘Baggy Trousers’. We lived above the shops in Hainault and I remember I went down expecting to buy their second album, ‘Absolutely’. But when I got there they’d all sold out, so I bought this instead. I fell in love with it. In a way it shapes my life really. It opened my mind to music, to reggae and ska, soul, rock steady, Ian Dury...I still listen to all that now. I’m a big reggae collector, pre73-74. I’m mad on vinyl. I still love Madness, but I felt a bit self-conscious listening to it in front of everyone. It’s almost an immature music. It had a real fairground ska type of thing, a real bouncy type of music, it’s all quite happy-go-lucky. On the sleeve is written ‘Steve Palmer’. That was my old name. I changed it a year or two later when my mum remarried. It makes me feel very strange when I look at that name now – like it was another life”

Claire Russell, 40, design manager for Doc Martens Art Garfunkel: Bright Eyes “I bought it with the help of my mum and dad when I was four and a half. I vaguely remember going into the record shop in Dumfries and hiding behind my mum’s leg. I’d seen the film [‘Watership Down’], and cried. I still get very moved when I hear the song. He’d been through so much adversity, he helped all his friends get safe and he shouldn’t have died because he was brilliant. What a brave, brave rabbit”

Liam Daniel

features

THE METHOD One is a world-famous cosmologist with a severe degenerative disease. The other is an able-bodied young actor with no science credentials. So how did Eddie Redmayne turn himself into Stephen Hawking? Clemency Burton-Hill followed him through a painstaking process

eptember 2013. A young man lies in a Cambridge hotel room, wide awake. Dawn slips through the curtains as the clock ticks on. All through the night he has been watching that clock. As it reaches 4am, he is tempted to turn to the packet of sleeping pills in his washbag. In an hour’s time, a car will take him to a day’s work that will involve inhabiting one of the world’s most famous minds – and bodies. Over the next 12 hours, this man, who has never had a day’s acting training, will play the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. First, in the morning, as a healthy young man in 1963, before his diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease (mnd); then, after lunch, walking with two sticks in the late 1960s; and finally, probably by late afternoon, in a wheelchair, in the late 1980s. The scenes all share the same location, St John’s College. Shooting them on the same day will save money, so never mind the chronology, or the leading man’s sanity.

Eddie Redmayne is all too aware of those concerns. His “currency”, he feels, is low, and the film-makers have taken a risk in hiring him. He decides against the sleeping pill. Four months earlier, I had happened to see Redmayne a few hours after he received a phone call offering him the lead in “The Theory of Everything”, a feature film adapted from a memoir by Stephen Hawking’s ex-wife, Jane Wilde. We had been friends at university and our professional lives had collided over the years – I had interviewed him about his Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse and his Marius in the blockbuster film of “Les Misérables”. That evening, I watched as his euphoria subsided into a creeping sort of horror and his skin, always rather freckled and pale, took on a greenish tinge. At this point I asked, on a whim, if he would be open to the idea of my following him as he tackled the role. I knew he disliked talking about himself, but perhaps the fear distracted him. He said yes. > portrait ian winstanley

How to disappear Eddie Redmayne as himself, in London in September. OPPOSITE Redmayne as Stephen Hawking

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month later, we are in an unassuming patch of green near Redmayne’s flat in Bermondsey. To call it a park would be generous; though most Londoners would, and he does. This is where he comes to learn lines. Preparing to play Mark Rothko’s assistant in John Logan’s 2009 play “Red” (for which he won an Olivier, then a Tony on Broadway) and, two years later, as he worked on Shakespeare’s Richard II (a Critic’s Choice Award), he was here every day, “because it takes me forever to learn anything”. He likes to arrive early. “You come at 5am and there are a couple of people with their dogs. Gradually, around 7, a few people doing tai-chi might rock up. At 8.30 it’s mums and dads taking their kids to school. At 8.59 it’s the mums and dads that are late. And then there’s this nutter walking around all the while, muttering lines to himself.” Why does he put himself through it? “My grandma was a great worrier and I think I inherited that from her. I worry that it takes me longer than most actors to really… embed things.” As he often does when discussing his work, Redmayne slips into the second person. “So the thing that gets you out of bed at the crack of dawn is the knowledge that you’re going to be judged for it, in front of an audience. It is a great driving factor, the stakes being high.” The stakes have never been higher, professionally, for Redmayne but at this stage, with the shoot a few months away, learning the lines is the least of his worries. Aware of the pitfalls of luvvieness, he shudders as he hears the word “process” tumble out of his mouth. But he’s about to play a living icon in the grip of a fierce degenerative disease, so some sort of process is required. At least he didn’t call it a journey. “I didn’t train to be an actor,” he says, “I blagged my way into it, and I always feel I’m waiting to be found out. So whenever you get a job, there’s a moment of euphoria and then the realisation, ‘oh my God, you’ve got to do this’. And you feel there should be some scaffolding. I’ve worked with people who have their preferred way of rehearsing guaranteed by clause in their contract. But it’s not like I have a process, it’s a very formless thing, and there’s no one telling you, ‘this is what you’re going to do and this is how you’re going to do it.’” To win the part (“I found the script a revelation and chased pretty hard for it”), Redmayne had sat in a Marylebone pub with the director James Marsh, who is best known for documentaries, including the Oscar-winning “Man on Wire”. “It was about four in the afternoon. James said, ‘What are you having?’ I was trying to judge whether to have a proper drink or not. I asked for a beer. He came back with a coffee. I drank about five beers. He drank a lot of coffee. By the time we left, I was drunk and he was wired.” Somewhere between that first drink and the last, Redmayne had convinced Marsh he would tackle the part in such a way that “everything would be connected to everything. Because it is obviously the most extraordinary challenge and responsibility, to be trusted to tell the story of someone’s

Photo reproduction ABOVE Stephen Hawking marries Jane Wilde, on whose memoir the film is based. RIGHT Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones recreate the moment

family, which is also a sensitive and complicated one. And to investigate all these aspects of this iconic human being: the physical, the vocal, the scientific, and then cohere it all in the emotional, because at its heart this is a very unusual love story. Young love, passionate love, family love, love of a subject, but also the failures of love and the boundaries of love.” Today, in the park, he works with a choreographer, Alex Reynolds, who has come on board to help Redmayne (“riddled with fear”). Their aim, he says, is to “try to map out Stephen’s specific physical decline, fix it in the details and embed all of that, so that I can forget it, because the illness is the least important part of life, as far as he’s concerned. Fifty years ago he was given two or three years to live, and he’s always chosen to look forward despite the guillotine over his head. It’s important to have all the physical stuff down so that Felicity [Jones, as Jane] and I are free to play the human story.” Redmayne was the first actor Marsh saw for the job. “Very quickly I was persuaded that Eddie was going to do something extraordinary with this role,” Marsh tells me later on the phone from his home in Copenhagen. “He’s part >

Liam Daniel

feet in these photos, Sidle and Clarke have raised the possibil ity that Hawking, without knowing it, already has the disease. Redmayne likes this idea. “Foot drop is often one of the first symptoms,” he tells me, demonstrating. He’s wearing jeans and scuffed grey Con verse sneakers with thin black laces. “But it’s usually invisible for a long time. You don’t realise you’re doing it because your knee automatically compensates by lifting that foot slightly higher. But one day if you’re walking quickly or whatever, and the knee forgets to do that, your foot might catch and fall.” He turns and jogs back to the end of the path, then walks it again, while Alex Reynolds films him on an iPad. They will analyse these sequences over and over, as if they were Nov ak Djokovic and his coach. “We were never just going to mimic shapes,” Reynolds says later. “Eddie is so profoundly inter ested in what these people are telling him. His desire is to have a real understanding of these bodies and to find that authentic language in a well body. His attention to detail is forensic.” “It appeals to me, the idea of doing something again and again until you fucking get it right,” Redmayne says. “You keep pushing, but you never quite get to where you want to go.” This is not the first time I’ve seen him hone a limp. In 2011, I interviewed him in North Carolina on the set of the indie film “Hick”, in which he plays a charismatic Texan cow boy with a damaged leg who happens to be a homicidal psycho path. He had been walking with a rock in his boot for weeks. The film had a limited release even in America and the people who saw it in Britain can probably be counted on one hand, but Redmayne is proud of it. It’s a quirk of his career that this of a very interesting generation and there were half a dozen actors being discussed for the part.” He liked the passion Red mayne showed. “And the fact that he seemed properly scared. He must have drunk at least four pints in front of me, and that was a nice little indication he was human. There aren’t many American actors who would do that.” Redmayne moves back and forth across the gravelly path that divides the park, minutely adjusting the already almost imperceptible movements of his right foot. The Mon day morning after he got the job, he contacted the Queen Square Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases in London, and for the past few weeks he has been attending the Motor Neu rone Disease clinic there, run by a consultant neurologist, Dr Katie Sidle. She and her clinical nurse, Jan Clarke, have been taking him through the various diagnoses and stages, helped by mnd sufferers including Glenn, a former academic, and anoth er Eddie, a former athlete and swimming teacher. There is no public footage of Hawking from before his diagnosis, so Red mayne has brought old photos from Hawking’s student days to get a sense of the state he will be in at the top of the film, when as a phd student at Cambridge he meets Jane. Nobody can pin point the moment when mnd takes hold; many sufferers are only diagnosed after a fall. By examining Hawking’s hands and

“HE MUST HAVE DRUNK FOUR PINTS IN FRONT OF ME. THERE AREN’T MANY AMERICAN ACTORS WHO’d DO THAT” JAMES MARSH, DIRECTOR seemingly untroubled Englishman has spent much of the past decade playing American misfits and outcasts, including an adopted Native Indian in “The Yellow Handkerchief” (2008) with William Hurt, and the troubled, gay, teenage son of Julianne Moore in “Savage Grace” (2007). In 2004 he had been Jonathan Pryce’s troubled, gay, teenage son in Edward Albee’s “The Goat” at the Almeida theatre (in which he memorably asked his stage father: “You’re fucking a goat?”). In 2008 he was the troubled, gay, teenage son of an American president in “Now or Later” by Christopher Shinn at the Royal Court. (Redmayne, by the way, is straight. To the distress of thou sands of so-called Redmayniacs, of both sexes, he is soon to marry Hannah Bagshawe, an antiques dealer from Stafford shire. They have known each other since they were teenagers.) Only a few times has Redmayne played close to type,

> in “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, Sebastian Faulks’s “Birdsong” (both bbc2) and Stephen Poliakoff’s wartime drama “Glorious 39” (bbc Films). These performances were fine, with moments of brilliance, but they were not revelatory. James Marsh had seen him hold his own opposite Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) in “My Week with Marilyn” (2011): “It wasn’t a very epic film, but I could see there was a lot more to him than the character he was playing.” When Marsh watched “The Yellow Handkerchief” after the session in the pub, he was “astonished at how Eddie seemed to disappear”. Marsh is echoed by Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech”, who cast Redmayne in the Channel 4 mini-series “Elizabeth I” (2005) and “Les Misérables” (2012). “His ability to disappear into the personalities he’s creating is very rare. There’s a type of film acting in which the audience want to see the actor they know and love, but Eddie seems to be drawn to these roles that require a lot of work to disappear into something that’s not him.” “What I’ve worked out is that whenever I jump further from myself, I seem to have more success,” Redmayne says, using a favourite metaphor. It is a drab morning in August 2013 and we are in Borough Market in London. Surrounded by every kind of artisan foodstuff, we sit on cheap plastic chairs in Maria’s Café, which was here long before the baristas moved in. Redmayne, wearing a blue baseball cap, orders two mugs of frothy tea and one of Maria’s bacon, cheese and

“WHAT I’VE WORKED OUT IS THAT WHENEVER I JUMP FURTHER FROM MYSELF, I SEEM TO HAVE MORE SUCCESS” EDDIE REDMAYNE bubble baps. It’s for me. Naturally skinny, he now has to lose weight to play Hawking at his sickest, and then go back to the make-up designer, Jan Sewell, to be “made to look healthy”. Since I saw him last, he has been gathering research on his iPad and in two ring-binders of notes. “Be curious,” Stephen Hawking impels us, and Redmayne is taking him at his word. “It is extraordinarily fascinating,” he says. “The second you start delving into this story, it’s so ripe, so complicated and full. And every piece of research I’ve done has value because it’s catalysed an idea about something else.” He and Reynolds have been going to the mnd clinic in Queen Square every fortnight. She tells me later she has been “amazed by people’s willingness to allow a stranger to hold their hand and watch it curl back in, to feel the weight of a leg.” It can’t be comfortable, for any of them. “At first, Eddie and I were pushing ourselves against the wall trying not to be there,” she says. “With one patient, I felt so moved and I thought, ‘it’s not your moment to cry’. But Eddie doesn’t

bring any actoriness into the room. They can read that in his spirit. And it’s clear also that he’s not going to take any shortcuts. So it ends up being a very respectful exchange.” Redmayne shows me some more videos of him trying to hone Hawking’s physicality, “learning to isolate muscles I wasn’t even aware of before”. There are clips of Katie Sidle demonstrating a condition called “simian hand” and talking about muscle spasms called “fasciculations” and the difference between “upper and lower neurons”; and of the nurse Jan Clarke showing Redmayne how to use an e-trans Board, a perspex sheet of colours and grouped letters with which mnd sufferers often learn to communicate after undergoing tracheotomies. There are audio clips of him working with a vocal coach, Julia Wilson-Dixon, on Hawking’s voice, before he lost it. For much of the film, Redmayne will be wheelchairbound. He’ll talk with his eyebrows, a few select muscles in his face, and the flat tones of a voice-box, primed to simulate the one Hawking uses.

as he met Hawking, I ask? He has been pushing for a meeting since day one, but Hawking is “very busy”. Redmayne has had dinners with Jane and her second husband Jonathan Hellyer-Jones (also in the film, played by Charlie Cox) and has met two of the three Hawking children. Last week, he saw the costume designer Steven Noble to try some of the outfits. He produces

features

Johan Persson

Uneasy lies the head Redmayne as Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse in 2011, a performance which won him both an Olivier and a Tony

a series of photographs, so like the real Hawking that I almost choke on Maria’s excellent bubble-and-squeak. “Certain elements of his image are so recognisable, like his glasses, and his physical shape in clothing – I knew that would help a lot.” His Photo Stream also contains a weirdly long series of nondescript rooms and hallways. “Shots from the location scouts,” he says. “I’ve never asked to see those before, but all of this will have ramifications on what a wheelchair can do. I don’t want to turn up on day one and for those details not to have been properly thought through.” Glenn, one of the mnd patients, has invited Redmayne to his home in Watford, which has led to a lot of notes about corners and corridors. And penmanship: there’s a video of Glenn trying to pick up a biro and write his name. “That’s just absolutely exhausting, that is,” Glenn tells him on the video, with zero self-pity. “And that’s critical,” Redmayne tells me. He’s been mining the screenplay, rooting out scenes in which the thumbprint of Hollywood might show up. He “pushed and pushed at the script, inflected it with details that felt true based on his grasp of Stephen’s physicality,” Marsh says. “He did a huge amount of work on the script, he was absolutely determined to do justice to the disease.” One scene had Hawking, frustrated by his failing hand when trying to write down an equation,

ripping through the paper in fury. “He wouldn’t have been able to grip the pen,” Redmayne says, coolly. “There is no way he would have torn through a page.” So the scene went. To anchor himself against the chaos of non-chronological filming, he has created a vast, handwritten chart that tracks the scene number, the period, the content of the scene, and notes on physique, voice, make-up and costume. “It’s not normal for me to be so obsessively technical, but the second a muscle goes, it can’t come back again in a different scene,” he says. “It’s not something the director can fudge in the edit.” Whether it’s normal for him seems debatable. Michael Grandage directed Redmayne in both “Red” and “Richard II” when he was artistic director of the Donmar. On the phone from his home in London, on the eve of his own film debut directing “Genius”, Grandage discusses Redmayne. “His ability to open himself up emotionally and let an audience in is second to none. He is a phenomenal talent. But he’s also collaborative, approachable, wonderful to work with.” In what way? “Well it’s possible, as an actor, just to turn up and say ‘what shall we do today?’ Eddie is not a passive actor. He researches – he comes to the rehearsal room brimming with stuff he wants to try out and then he comes back the next day with more. During the run, he hones that process and carries it through to the end. He’s always trying to better himself.” He sees my next question coming: “Please God, don’t ask me if there’s a negative about Eddie, because there isn’t.” To Tom Hooper, “Eddie has this emotional transparency, and he gives you a direct window onto it, which is a rare thing, especially for an English male actor. But that’s combined with a fierce intellectual rigour.” He recently cast Redmayne for the third time, as the painter Einar Wegener, one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, in the forthcoming film “The Danish Girl”. “He’s spent months working with a movement director, meeting the transgender community in Britain and America, reading everything he can get his hands on. Most young actors in his position are doing far too many movies to do that. By the time we start he’ll have done six months of pure preparation. It’s very rare, this discipline, this conscientious, obsessional drive to get it right.” All of which might come as a surprise to Redmayne’s tutors. Reading history of art at Cambridge, he did an average amount of work, ie, not much. He had applied to university rather than drama school to keep his parents happy, and was “passionate” about painting. “I always felt a guilt, because the engineering faculty is next to art history, so we’d walk down Fitzwilliam Street alongside these engineers, and their working hours were so long, while all these bohemian-looking people were floating in for a couple of hours’ lectures a week and going off to write about, say, Marxist art theory. And then we all leave university with a number, a degree, which doesn’t reflect the vastly different amount of hours that go into it.” He was a choral scholar at Trinity (“useful preparation for ‘Les Mis’”) and acted in at least a play a term. His >

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> contemporaries included Rebecca Hall, Tom Hiddleston and Dan Stevens, all film stars now, so there was no shortage of competition. If my memory serves, he was not averse to sinking four pints in an afternoon. When I ask how intellectually confident he is, he fumbles about and then says, “Fair to middling? But I have to work hard at it.” He says he did work for finals, in which he took a solid 2:1, with a first for his thesis on Yves Klein, of the blues fame. Beyond that sympathy for the engineers, he showed no interest in science. “I did physics gcse and just about got away with it,” he told me soon after embarking on Hawking, “but I was utterly ignorant about the discoveries behind the icon. A huge part of this is: how do you play someone with a brain that big?” How is he getting on with the cosmology?” In his bag is “A Brief History of Time”, Hawking’s 1980s bestseller. Many copies of it are reckoned to have gone unread, but his is encouragingly ratty. He flips it open. “So he starts by talking about a tower of tortoises, and then moves into a discussion about Ancient Greece, and I was like, ok, I get this, I’m on to this, maybe there’s a chance I’m going to understand how the universe works!” He turns a few more pages. “And somewhere between page 21 and page 25 I completely lost it.”

“THERE ARE PLENTY OF PEOPLE WHO WENT TO ETON. THERE IS ONLY ONE ACTOR LIKE HIM” TOM HOOPER, DIRECTOR He has been working with one of Hawking’s students, Professor Jerome Gauntlett, head of theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, to grasp some of the theories that will be explored in the film – although “this is definitely not a story about physics. Anthony [McCarten, the screenwriter] has done a great job of distilling some of that, of trying to make things comprehensible to a general audience.” Progress has been slow. “Jerome will be trying to explain Hawking Radiation or singularities or string theory and I’ll have to say, no, no, I gave up physics at school: imagine I’m six years old.”

chool was Eton, always a red rag to the media. Every few months, there’s a story about how much harder it is getting to succeed in acting without an affluent background. Redmayne doesn’t deny that his has helped. “I had an incredibly privileged upbringing,” he says. “When I was working in a pub and going to endless unsuccessful auditions, I could live at home rent-free in London. That was the really great privilege.” And Eton? “The facilities are exceptional, and if you have an interest in anything – art, design, drama, sport, music – that school will support you.” For him, though, the great gift

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of That School was something very ordinary: a single teacher, lighting the way. “The year after I started, a drama teacher arrived called Simon Dormandy, and he treated us like professional actors. He had high expectations – you played women, you played old men, you were pushed outside your comfort zone. Everything you see about Eton from the outside is very structured: it’s hierarchy and order, all uniforms and collars. But Simon encouraged freedom and playfulness and allowed you the room to make mistakes. Most importantly, for me, he taught us how to speak verse. I did ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard III’ there, and I suppose that’s where it all began.” Dormandy was also instrumental in launching Redmayne’s professional career. “In 2002, when I was still at Cambridge and Mark Rylance was putting on the 400th anniversary of ‘Twelfth Night’ at Middle Temple Hall, the casting director from the Globe asked Simon if he knew any young actors who might play Viola. I auditioned and got the part.” As he downs the rest of his tea, I notice three girls standing by a tower of funghi, surreptitiously trying to take his photograph. “In this world, the first break is the one that matters. Because from that came everything – my agent, the whole thing.” “Whatever Eddie’s got, that’s what you spend your life looking for,” says the agent in question, Dallas Smith, who saw him in “Twelfth Night” and signed him on the spot. “He had a unique presence, even completely untrained, the sort of magnetism that only great actors have. The fact he had gone to Eton and Cambridge was meaningless. He had the most astonishing natural acting ability. You can’t teach that.” “Eddie has the most prodigious gift, and it’s got to a point where his talent transcends the whole discussion,” says Tom Hooper, dismissively. “There are plenty of people who went to Eton. There is only one actor like him.” Redmayne is, in many ways, an unlikely actor. “I’ve no idea where any of it comes from,” Michael Grandage says. “I’m not sure he does. Ask him!” Redmayne was born in London in 1982 into a family that had never dipped a toe into the performing arts. His mother Patricia runs a relocation business and loves golf; his father Richard is a banker. His half-brother Charlie is the ceo of the publisher HarperCollins; his half-sister Eugenie works for Prudential. His elder brother James is in private equity and his younger brother Tom has recently qualified as a chartered surveyor. While at Cambridge, Redmayne himself did internships at Cazenoves (“the greatest acting job of my life, trying to pretend I knew what a share was”) and on the Evening Standard business pages (“I wrote a piece about tax self-assessment schemes, all of about seven lines, but I did get a byline. My mum’s probably kept it somewhere”). Then, one afternoon, his shift in the pub was interrupted by a call from Smith. He had landed a part in “Doctors”, the daytimetv show. “Probably the most exciting day of my life.” So where does it come from? “I have no idea either. I’m someone who likes clarity, some sense of structure, and yet I’ve ended up in this peripatetic and crazy existence, in which

features Paying his dues Redmayne with Kristen Stewart in “The Yellow Handkerchief” (2008), in one of his three roles as a troubled gay teenager

you’re at the beck and call of everyone else. I think that’s why family is so important to me. In the rest of my life I’m trying to create something as rooted as possible.”

alamy

ust before “The Theory of Everything” begins shooting, we meet in the bar of the Young Vic theatre in London. It’s September 2013 and Redmayne, who has been working with Reynolds all summer in the Jerwood Space nearby, is fresh from a movement session. Or rather frazzled. He orders a Diet Coke and a chicken salad. A few days ago he got his audience with Hawking. He paints a toe-curling picture of the two of them sitting at Hawking’s house in Cambridge for an hour and a half – one “vomiting forth into the void”, the other silent, motionless, amused. “I was terrified, because I’d made choices, in terms of his physical decline and his character, that I couldn’t now go back on. So I was thinking ‘oh God, what if I meet him and it changes everything, is this going to undermine all the work I’ve done?’ Then his carers, who are lovely, took me in to meet him, and the first thing I do is over-apologise for the fact that someone who’d studied art history is playing this great scientific mind.” He sips his Diet Coke. “These days, Stephen has glasses with a sensor under them. On the screen, rather than the predictive text software he used to have, there’s an alpha-

bet with a cursor. When he does this movement [Redmayne makes a sort of blink] it stops on a letter. So if you’re speaking to him live, it takes him a long time to respond. You don’t see that on telly, because he’s usually been sent questions in advance. And because it’s hard for him to speak and because I hate silence, I just spew forth information about Stephen Hawking to Stephen Hawking for the next 40 minutes. The first thing he eventually says, after all that time, is ‘please, call me Stephen’, because I’ve been calling him Professor Hawking all the way through. So I massively apologise for that. “And then, for some reason, I hear myself informing him he was born on January 8th, because I’ve been talking about science and religion in our film and he makes this point in his book ‘My Brief History’ about how he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo, and then I tell him I was born on January 6th, I don’t know why I say it, but I do, ‘so we’re both Capricorns’, and then the second it comes out of my mouth I’m like, ‘Fuck. What did I just say to Stephen Hawking?’ And there is this punishing four or five minutes as he blinks away. Finally, the voice says, with killer timing: ‘I am an astronomer, not an astrologer.’ And it’s just, the idea that he might think the guy playing him in a biopic thinks he’s Mystic Meg…” Redmayne rubs his hands furiously through his hair. “I don’t think I ever will get over it.” >

I ask what he was hoping to take from the meeting, besides a chat about their shared horoscope. “I suppose I wanted some sense of approval. That he was ok with me taking on his life. Obviously he hasn’t yet seen what I’m going to do, but I felt very supported.” It was also a revelation, he suggests, to see at first hand “how Stephen runs a room. He’s in complete control. Not only is he clearly adored by all the people around him, it’s amazing to see how flirtatious he is, but also he emanated wit and humour and this sort of energy. Even though he can use very few muscles now, it’s one of the most expressive faces I’ve ever seen. He’s very funny. With his voice machine, there’s no intonation, no way of delivering something with nuance, so all he has is the capacity to press play. Watching how he navigates that is amazing; his timing is magnificent. He is the king of the one-liner. He’s cool.” Redmayne’s eyes glitter. “He’s fucking cool.” As we leave, I wish him luck and ask if he’s planning any more preparation. He says he is going to stick three pictures up in his trailer: Einstein with his tongue out, James Dean leaning against a wall, and the joker from a pack of cards.

few days after the shoot wraps, on a drizzly Wednesday in December 2013, we meet at a Pizza Express near Oxford Circus. Redmayne is a lifelong devotee of their salad dressing and orders extra on the side. He looks physically shattered, if pleased to be eating pizza again. When I ask about the shoot, he can barely muster the energy to talk about it, although he raves about his co-star, Jones, describing her as “exquisite in the film. She has this amazing fragility but also a backbone. She never made the easy choices. Jane is not a well-known figure, it’s not like

Stephen, so she could have taken liberties but she was authentic right down to the voice, to the manner, to the look. It’s a beautifully judged performance.” As Redmayne tears into his pizza I notice that his face looks different, in a way that’s hard to quite pinpoint. He reaches a freckled hand up to his right cheek and explains there are now muscles there that have developed since he started working on Hawking’s facial movements and tics, his lopsided grin and his gurn. “In nine weeks there was no let-up for him,” James Marsh tells me. “We had to keep going until the very last minute. Eddie was stretching himself, elongating himself, collapsing himself in different ways every day. He was cracking his voice, doing these violent throat clearings in a way that would allow his voice to be ruined afterwards. And every day he was reckoning with mortality and decline, and there’s a psychological element to that too. As an actor his repertoire is almost non-existent by the end: it’s eyebrows, cheeks, a bit of a smile, nothing else. But he is so alive from start to finish. What Eddie did, not only physically and mentally but emotionally, is at the far end of what an actor can achieve in a performance.” The Academy loves a biopic, and all the more so when the protagonist is ill or injured. Seven of the past ten Best Actor Oscars have gone to portrayals of real people. Within days of the news breaking that Redmayne had been cast as Hawking, the website Deadline Hollywood suggested “this opens the opportunity for the kind of work Daniel Day-Lewis turned in in ‘My Left Foot’…” Certain roles, it has to be said, seem to have Oscar written all over them. But roles are not performances. In July 2014 Redmayne and I meet at Tate Modern to see the Matisse cut-outs,

Universal Pictures

Before MND Redmayne, with Harry Lloyd, taking notes from James Marsh

features and he hits back hard when I suggest the Hawking film fulfils a certain Oscar formula. “All I can do is fail, then,” he counters, as we take in the joyous abstractions of Matisse’s paper shapes. He has been honouring his degree, as we move around the exhibition, with an informal commentary that is engaging and illuminating, if short on Marxist theory. “It’s impossible. If the first thing that is mentioned, before you’ve even done a day’s work, is a comparison with the person who, as far as I’m concerned, is the greatest living screen actor [Day-Lewis]– then whatever you do, you’ve fallen short.” He rails, too, against the idea that “disability is a ‘thing’; that what a disease does to a person isn’t unique to them. What’s extraordinary as I started to investigate mnd is how varied it is. It ends up being one thing in some of the people I met and something completely different in others.” We stop in front of “The Snail”, because how can you not, and he tells me that Eddie, the swimming teacher who helped with his research, died not long after filming finished. “He engaged with me in an incredibly generous way. If that is what people view it as, just ‘a disability film’, that feels a bit insensitive to those living with the reality of this disease.” James Marsh is equally robust when I raise the Oscar question with him. “You don’t embark on a project like this with those kinds of thoughts in your mind,” he maintains, gracious but unyielding. “That would be to somewhat miss the point of why anyone makes films. It’s not in anyone’s thinking. Our job was to do the best with this story; and you do that, and you put it in front of an audience. And that then completes the film: when an audience sees it. What then happens is what then happens, and we have no control or influence over that.”

n September 9th, “The Theory of Everything” goes in front of an audience for the first time, at the Toronto Film Festival. Redmayne is given a standing ovation. Hooper tells me he “wept” repeatedly. “Redmayne towers,” Catherine Shoard writes in the Guardian. “This is an astonishing, genuinely visceral performance which bears comparison with” – you’ve guessed it – “Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘My Left Foot’.” “At times I thought Eddie was me,” is what Stephen Hawking has to say. “To my surprise, I was very impressed with the film.” His “only regret” is that there isn’t more physics. Just before Marsh locks the cut, Hawking decides to give the film his voice. It is this gesture that has quite undone Redmayne when I see him next, after he gets back to Bermondsey. “That for me is the most moving thing of all.” He seems a little dazed. The selfies at Borough Market, the iPhone photos people grab on the Tube every day, the paparazzi shots of him and Hannah walking down the street, the offers from glossy magazines to “exclusively cover” their wedding (“no thank you!”): all this is the tip of the iceberg, surely. Does he have a sense that his life is about to change? Grinning, he points out that he’s getting married: of course his

life is going to change. “I feel very lucky,” he ventures, when I press him. “Nothing has happened overnight, it’s the smallest of shifts. I’ve just put one foot in front of the other over the past decade and managed to keep working, and working with great people. So yeah, gradually, there’s being photographed surreptitiously on the Tube and it ending up online. But that’s a very small price to get to do what you’re passionate about.” Hawking once said: “While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behaviour…I’m no [good] at understanding what makes people tick.” There is always a danger, as awards season beckons and we hear of the “risks” actors take, their “challenges” and “vulnerability”, their “courage”, that we lose sight of the fact that a grown person is being paid rather a lot of money to dress up and pretend to be someone else. Over the 18 months I’ve been following him, I have lost track of the number of times Redmayne has apologised for the fact that acting isn’t surgery. “It isn’t theoretical physics,” he says at one point. “It’s not solving the secrets of the universe. Solving a degenerative disease. Solving anything.” And yet. We all know that, at their best, theatre and cinema do matter. “When approached honestly and simply, the craft of acting has the ability to change lives,” Michael

“YOU DON’T EMBARK ON A PROJECT LIKE THIS WITH THOUGHTS OF OSCARS IN YOUR MIND. THAT WOULD BE TO MISS THE POINT” JAMES MARSH Grandage says. “Eddie is someone who would never say that out loud, but he is up there with a very few actors who understand the power of simplicity and trust themselves to be that honest and that simple. Where others are making all sorts of complicated choices, he will cut through everything and give you a moment of honesty that can take your breath away.” Grandage recalls a line that comes near the end of Shakespeare’s “Richard II”: “grief makes one hour ten”. I’m reminded of the way Redmayne described mnd to me, right at the beginning of his journey – because we may as well call it that. “Like being in a prison, with the prison walls getting smaller every day,” he said. “Every hour is a day, every day is a week, every week is a month and every month is a year. Your notion of time changes. Your notion of everything changes.” Grief makes one hour ten. “He manages to find a deep emotional well from which to be able to say a line,” Grandage goes on, “and by showing so much of himself, makes us learn something about ourselves. Then he just says it. And it is in that, in the just saying it, that the alchemy occurs.” n The Theory of Everything opens in America Nov 7th, Britain Jan 1st

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CULTURE He’s been framed Claire Messud peers at Jan Massys’s portrait of Judith, the Hebrew widow who seduced and then beheaded Nebuchadnezzar’s general Holofernes

Authors on museums

A home from home Most of the treasures in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts spent their early lives outside America. For the novelist Claire Messud, that makes them kindred spirits I first came to Boston as a teenager, enrolled in a boarding school in the southern suburbs once attended by the young T.S. Eliot. The school was founded in 1798 – which, in American terms, is old. For me, Boston was the stuff of novels: after a childhood largely spent in Sydney and Toronto, in what seemed to me a sort of Commonwealth periphery, I was headed, at last, for a city about which memorable stories had been told and great poems written. It was also a city in which extraordinary paintings had been collected. I loved the fact that so much of Boston’s cultural identity had been confected by eccentric hybrids and expatriates, by odd, thoughtful people who lived in between America and Europe – Whistler (born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he was happy when mistaken in Europe for a Russian), Sargent (born in Europe to American parents, he consolidated his Boston connections only later in life), Henry James (who, in spite of his British naturalisation, is buried in the Cambridge Cemetery, half a mile from my house), Edith Wharton (“I was a failure in Boston…because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable”). With a French father, a Canadian mother and the only American passport in the family, I was often anxious about not being American enough: all these painters were reassuring to me. Most of the United States has little interest in Europe, but that seemed not to be the case in Boston – not if you judged it by its art. As a schoolgirl, I went rarely to the Museum of Fine Art: the café was expensive, the gift shop didn’t sell anything we wanted. We gravitated to the pavements of Harvard Square and Newbury Street, opting for the museum only in winter, to get out of the cold. But somehow those adolescent visits impressed upon me a proprietorial sense about the place, an almost familial pride. When I returned 20 years later to live here with my husband and young children, I came >

photographs CHARLIE MAHONEY

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> back to the mfa as if to the embrace of extended family: there were my old friends, John Singleton Copley’s “Watson and the Shark”, Thomas Sully’s “The Torn Hat”, Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”. They became my children’s friends, too. We joined the museum so as to visit for half an hour without guilt, and went briefly and often. The children found their favourites, and have them still. My daughter Livia, at about six, tried to copy a Frank W. Benson painting of three kids in a boat. Her version hangs in her bedroom, and she thinks of the original as her own. My son Lucian likes Whistler’s “Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice”. We all like Childe Hassam’s “Boston Common at Twilight”. With its grimed snow and sulphurous dusk, it evokes exactly our own winter evenings, erasing the 130 years between then and now. The museum first opened its doors about a decade before that work was painted, on Independence Day 1876; it moved to its current quarters in 1909. There have been multiple expansions since, including the glassy new Art of the Americas wing designed by Norman Foster, which opened in 2010. These big bright spaces sit surprisingly well around the original 1909 Beaux Arts building, but the quiet core remains my favourite – sepulchral in the way of museums of my childhood, largely unwindowed, with broad corridors and staircases, hushed and echoey like a library, where every footfall speaks. Rearranged in the new wing, some of our favourites are hard to find. “Watson and the Shark” used to be visible from miles away, illuminated at the end of a long corridor, but can now only be seen from much closer up, and seems a little cramped. More dismayingly, Sully’s “The Torn Hat” – that boy who was like a cousin to Livia and Lucian – is no longer on display at all. After a brief and unfortunate spell behind glass in a mocked-up 19th-century sitting room, it has returned to the mysterious vaults where, I’m told, 95% of the museum’s holdings mutter in darkness. An early 19thcentury American portrait of a long-nosed chap with what looked like a sock on his head has vanished too; though others, like Sargent’s Boit sisters, have fared well and are now beautifully shown. Still, it’s a relief to return to our family’s old haunts – to the damask-lined Koch Gallery with the European masters or to the newly reopened Impressionist gallery – and find things where we expect them to be. One unchanged corner which I always visit, hoping to find it empty, is the little vaulted room containing the 12th-century Spanish frescoes “Christ in Majesty with Symbols of the Four Evangelists”, taken from a

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Near to tears Depictions of the Virgin and Child can be almost comical, but the intimacy of this one makes it profoundly moving

small chapel in the Spanish Pyrenees. Mysterious and solemn but full of delight (who is that dancing chap in blue pleats, apparently raising a curtain, stage right?), these frescoes afford an opportunity for contemplation, a moment of retreat. Even more than these figures with their beautiful Byzantine eyes, I come to this space to visit the Italian sculpture of the Virgin and Child, of the same vintage. Many renditions of the Christ child make me smile (how oddly proportioned He can be, and what funny colours!), but this one brings me near to tears. He and his mother have oddly long heads, it’s true, and in this way are stylised and foreign; but the folds of her dress, the precision of their limbs, the intensity of their embrace, the insistence of his small hand at the back of her neck, the yearning stretch of his face towards her cheek, his slight frown – I feel I know them, and their intense emotion. Theirs is at once the longing of every small child for its mother’s body, and at the same time,

strangely, discomfitingly, this Christ has about him something almost adult. The passion of their familial intimacy is recognisable across almost a millennium; this is the most human Christ I have ever seen. In a completely different manner, Van Dyck’s Princess Mary is totally present too. She’s one of the few genuinely old paintings that my kids, it seems, can really see. The daughter of Charles I of England, Mary is captured around the time of her betrothal to William of Orange; and is fittingly satinned and bejewelled. Her sleeves look like they weigh a ton. But what’s wonderful about young Mary – aside from the shimmer of her fabrics and the precision of their ornamentation, or the light folding of her childishly plump hands over her stomach – is the luminous rendition of her face and its familiar expression. My husband says, each time he sees her, “Oh, there’s Amy!” because she so thoroughly resembles a former colleague of his. Mary is wary – as she should be, standing stiffly for this great Flemish portraitist, about to be married off at the tender age of nine. She’d be widowed at 19, shortly after the execution of her father at the hands of Oliver Cromwell. And she’d be dead herself by 29. She looks as though she has some sense that her road will not be easy, and that all the luxurious garments in the world cannot protect her. This Princess Mary came to America in the 1920s, sold by the Earl of Normanton and bought by Alvan Tufts Fuller, a wealthy car dealer who became governor of Massachusetts and lived to the ripe age of 80. If she could only have married him instead. My kids love the Impressionist gallery best, as I did when I was young – the acid-bright Van Goghs, the hazy purple and blue Monets, the bright flowerfilled Renoirs. Even now, as a teenager, my daughter has a frank affection for Degas’s sculpture of the little 14-year-old dancer, her chin up and her hands behind her back, her tulle skirt rather grubby but her satin hair ribbon brand new. Livia will stand beside the glass case and mimic the girl’s pose. She gave up ballet years ago, but she does it pretty well. My own favourite Degas is the “Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed”, an unfinished work bought at his posthumous studio sale in 1919. With her folded arms and averted gaze, she appears thoughtful, or neartearful, possibly even sulky – it’s hard to tell, just as it might be in life. Her face is largely in shadow, though her orangey lipstick glows; and her décolleté is an almost bruised grey, which, along with the black ribbon around her neck, imparts an atmosphere of darkness against the half-painted scarlet background. Her form is harshly outlined in black (how big and clumsy her

Her future is Orange Van Dyck’s portrait of Princess Mary, daughter of Charles I, on her betrothal to William of Orange. She was nine

All in the mind Degas conveys the interior life of this “Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed” – preoccupied, with a hint of sadness

right hand looks, when she is so generally graceful!); her skirt is pure white; and then, around her, the thin application of red paint allows the raw canvas to show through, balancing the white skirt with white patches on the left of the painting. Degas abandoned it in about 1872, but she remained for over 45 years in his studio: there’s a strange intimacy in seeing this girl, whom the famously difficult painter could neither approve of nor relinquish, standing in her sad defiance on the wall. Times have changed, and she no longer appears unfinished. A little blurred, off-colour, but intensely alive, she anticipates the contemporary work of, say, Marlene Dumas. Her presence, no less intense than Princess Mary’s, is more emotional and interior, a presence that insists upon the filter of the artist’s eye. As Edmond de Goncourt wrote after visiting Degas’s studio, “Of all the men I have seen engaged in depicting modern life, he is the one who has most successfully rendered the inner nature of that life.” Which brings me back to Sargent. Everyone at our house has his or her particular favourite: mine is “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was a portraitist of extraordinary facility. Claimed by Auguste Rodin as the “Van Dyck of our times”, he had the gift, like Van Dyck with Princess Mary, of capturing surfaces so precisely that their interior is evoked. For many years a society painter, he was both adored and disdained for the elegance and sensuousness of his work. There’s a celebration of loveliness and ease that cumulatively can seem superficial, insufficient, a rich >

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> man’s delight in velvet, brocade and Italian gardens, all of it underwritten by the wealthy and aristocratic patrons whose commissions for so many years occupied Sargent’s time. But the jewel in the mfa’s collection of his paintings is an antidote to this glossy illusory perfection, and proof that he was capable of darkness and complexity. “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” was painted in Paris in 1882, when the artist was in his mid-20s. The Boits were American friends of Sargent’s, originally from Boston but living in luxury in the 8th arrondissement. The four girls – from left to right (below), Mary Louisa, Florence, Jane and Julia – were painted in the foyer of their apartment, their white pinafores glistening in the gloom. The mfa’s Erica Hirshler tells us that Sargent was influenced by Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”, which he’d studied at the Prado in Madrid. But the painting is far from traditional: only one of its subjects, four-year-old Julia, looks directly at the viewer, her legs stuck out before her and her doll upon her lap. For these girls, growing older appears to be a matter of retreat. Mary Louisa, the next in age, stands to the left of the painting, staring into the middle distance, her hands behind her back. Her frock is a warm old rose, the brushwork Into the shadows “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”, painted by John Singer Sargent in 1882

of her pinafore thick and brilliant, slashes of extra white upon her waistband: she is still very much in the light. But the two elder sisters, Florence and Jane, in black dresses beneath their pinafores, have stepped back into the corridor, and Florence has largely turned her back to us, leaning against one of the enormous Japanese vases that command as much attention as the girls. Florence’s eye is on Jane, who has something lost about her, her stance and expression more tentative, more expectant, than her sisters’. Only little Julia engages with the viewer, and only grown-up Florence engages with one of her sisters. The other two are abstracted, even isolated. As with Degas’s dancer, their thoughts remain opaque, even as we can be certain that they’re thinking. Sargent, more than 20 years Degas’s junior, was ultimately the less adventurous painter. In his later years, rather like Edith Wharton, he came to be seen as old hat, obsolete, the fusty representative of a lost world. But even today, there’s something about this painting – the four sisters, none of whom would marry, and one of whom would struggle with mental illness – that is profoundly moving, and intimately familiar. Those girls, like Princess Mary, enjoyed the blessings of privilege and wealth, which cushioned but could not save them. Thanks to their peripatetic parents, they lived between cultures and countries, just as they stand in the painting in their apartment’s dark foyer on their way to somewhere else. There are advantages to this liminal state (I passionately believe in it, as someone also raised between different countries), but how relieving too, at the last, to have a home (not having had one, I wanted to make sure my children did); and how fitting a home the mfa is for these enigmatic Sargent girls, with one eye on the past and the other on the future. n MFA Boston open Saturday to Tuesday, 10am-4.45pm; Wednesday to Friday, 10am-9.45pm; mfa.org

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Kobal

Tom Shone At the Cinema Mike Leigh’s Turner shows how to handle beauty in the movies. With a shot of ugliness, or a whiff of rot Ah, the sweeping vistas and epic grandeur of Mike Leigh! Seriously. The gnomish poet of the council flat and the vegetable allotment has made a biopic of J.M.W. Turner which begins with a lovely tracking shot. Two Flemish maids carry buckets of water along the muddy banks of a canal, a windmill churns against the dawn light, before the eye settles on a distant figure in a top hat, Mr Turner (Timothy Spall), poised among the rushes like a pregnant stork. The cinematographer is Dick Pope, Leigh’s dp ever since “Life is Sweet”, whose most sprawling vista consisted of an unfinished suburban patio, which Jim Broadbent was forever promising to complete (“Anyone seen my grout?”). So has Leigh gone all English Heritage on us? Not a chance. From Spall’s porcine performance to the Hogarthian fly-by of noses, chins and whiskers that make up his supporting cast, Leigh has fashioned a film that would have delighted Turner’s champion, the art critic John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire). “To banish imperfection is to destroy expression,” he once proclaimed. Leigh shows painterliness entwined with pug-ugliness. Cinematography should be about more than just the making of pretty pictures. “Such beauty is a tricky thing,” the critic David Thomson once wrote, of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven”. “It’s not that photographic beauty is actually that difficult: the art of the camera begins with making the world look pretty, elegant and desirable when, in truth, it’s far more complicated. That’s why so much advertising is so good-looking; it makes us want to purchase. Thus, beauty sometimes can smother meaning.” British directors, in particular, can be prey to the lure of the pretty. Groomed in advertising, like Tony and Ridley Scott, or the theatre, like Kenneth Branagh and Sam Mendes, they can make the visuals mere embellishment of the drama rather than its means of expression. Mendes’s Bond film, “Skyfall”, photographed by Roger Deakins, was possibly the most beautiful Bond ever. There was barely a frame you couldn’t eat your dinner off, from the shoot-out against the gleaming billboards of Hong Kong, to the sight of Daniel Craig posed against a Scottish grouse moor. “I didn’t know you could get up here,” says Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), when they explore the turrets of Westminster. “Why waste a view?” responds Bond, like an E.M. Forster fop fondling his pince-nez. Should Bond be this beautiful? The really good action directors — James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Greengrass — are too busy constructing their sequences, rivet by rivet, to bother checking out their reflection in the plate glass. Peckinpah aside, only the cheeseheads use slow-mo. I once asked the late, great art critic David Sylvester for his definition of art. “A cheetah,” he said, “moving too fast to notice how beautiful it is.” It’s one of the reasons I love cinema: the aesthetic cover granted by its speed. You want to slow the best films down, reduce them to a set of stills, the better to take in the view, but they refuse and keep moving, leaving you with a pleasurable ache. Cinema fugit.

There’s a lovely shot of lanterns at dusk in Yimou Zhang’s “Raise the Red Lantern”, and a beautiful late-afternoon Parisian blue to the shopping sequence in Bertolucci’s “The Conformist”, that I look forward to every time, but both are gone in a flash, like a favourite guitar lick in a song. “I felt this section of ‘The Conformist’ in Paris should be filled with blue, which is the colour of freedom,” said the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. I go back and forth over whether the film has anything whatever to say on the subject of fascism; turn the sound down and you’d think you were watching a bunch of exceptionally chic and sexy spies. The film is

one of those gorgeous, deluxe, duplicitous sensory pleasures — like “Days of Heaven”, “Blade Runner” or “Barry Lyndon” — which seem to exist purely for the audience to lose themselves, as the director has, in the palace of the production design. I say “duplicitous” because the best of these films contain a hint of how quickly ripeness can turn to rot, like the apples and pears in nature morte. Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (above) may be the most beautiful movie ever. Featuring Brooke Adams, Richard Gere and Sam Shepard at their most handsome, and shot almost entirely in the violet hour, at dusk, it was a famous financial disaster, and sent Malick into a decades-long exile. But nothing could be more appropriate, for exile from Eden is exactly what the film is about, and the beauty that the cinematographer Néstor Almendros finds in a swarm of locusts, or a raging fire at night, has an almost biblical severity. This paradise was always meant to be lost. Nobody knew the destructive power of nature better than Turner, who in addition to his late stormscapes, painted an erupting Vesuvius, and the inferno that consumed the Houses of Parliament in 1834, an event he witnessed first-hand. Exploding columns of flame and collapsing roofs were met with rounds of applause and huzzahs. “All London went to see the fire and a very beautiful fire it was,” wrote Letitia Landon, to her friend and fellow poet Christina Rossetti. Sounds like a movie. n Mr Turner opens in Britain Oct 31st. Visual CV: Timothy Spall page 114

CULTURE

BOOKS FOUND IN TRANSLATION

NOTES ON A VOICE

On the road, again

J.G. Ballard “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” So wrote a reader on a manuscript of “Crash”. The writer, by contrast, called himself “a man of complete and serene ordinariness”. J.G. Ballard spent 50 years living in suburban London while imagining post-apocalyptic landscapes and fresh perversities. His work has to be read in the light of his early life: visions from it bubble up, swamp-like. Born in 1930 in Shanghai, Jim Ballard spent two years, from the age of 12, in a Japanese concentration camp. Overnight, he went from comfy expat life to watching Japanese soldiers beat a Chinese coolie to death. He never took civilised pretensions seriously again. When he turned the experience into “Empire of the Sun”, Martin Amis said it “gives shape to what shaped him”. Even in England, he retained an outsider’s eye. Shepperton, his home patch, he saw as “lunar and abstract”. He was a modern dad, raising three children after the death of his wife, but keeping an old-school routine: two hours’ writing in the morning, two in the afternoon, “then at six, Scotch and soda, and oblivion”. Will Self rates Ballard’s oeuvre as “the most significant single contribution to English literature in the past half-century”. “Ballardian” has come to denote “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, societal, and environmental development” (Collins). Often accused of being humourless, he was tempted to plead guilty. “But then, existence itself is a very special kind of joke”. KEY DECISION Dropping out of medical school, but not forgetting it. There he tasted psychoanalysis and acquired his surrealist anatomist’s eye: “I held her dissected hand, whose nerves and tendons I had teased into the light. Its layers of skin and muscle resembled a deck of cards that she waited to deal across the table to me.” (“The Kindness of Women”)

ROLE MODELS The Surrealists inspired Ballard to explore the mythologies of the psyche. Drained lake beds haunt his work as melting clocks do Dalí’s. The landscapes of Ballard’s early books – the glutinous swamps and crystallised jungles – could be paintings by Ernst. Jungian psychology then helped him populate these worlds. The same archetypal figures recur in many of his works as the protagonist, not quite knowingly, seeks transcendence through some manifestation of Jung’s deep, collective unconscious: “a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun” (“The Drowned World”). STRONG POINTS (1) Fusing mood and landscape; collapsing inner and outer space. “The blighted landscape and its empty violence, its loss of time, would provide its own motives” (“The Drought”). (2) Capturing the subliminal. In “The Drowned World” solar instability has left a sun that “thuds” and “booms”, heart-like, and the book’s laconic first sentence hums: “Soon it would be too hot.” (3) Prescience. He was in tune with the “near-future” and arguably foresaw climate change, Reagan’s presidency, the growth of gated communities, even Twitter. GOLDEN RULE Make the protagonist a doctor, always diagnosing, or self-diagnosing, with a medical detachment. FAVOURITE TRICKS (1) Recurring motifs – drained pools, concrete passovers, abandoned airfields – a “whole private mythology” of collaboration between the conscious and unconscious mind. (2) Dissonant elements: colonial tics (“Capital!”, “Damn’ shame about old Bodkin”) mix with high-rises and malls to suspend time. TYPICAL SENTENCE “Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire” (“The Day of Creation”). ~ TO M GR AH AM High-Rise is being filmed, with Tom Hiddleston in the lead

ENGLISH TITLE IN AMERICA AUTHOR GEERT MAK ORIGINAL LANGUAGE DUTCH TRANSLATOR LIZ WATERS In 1960 John Steinbeck – with the Nobel prize ahead of him but his best work long behind – went on a road trip with his dog. He drove through America from his home in Sag Harbour, hoping to take the temperature of the country and prove that he wasn’t washed up. The result was a bestseller, “Travels with Charley”, published in 1962. Fifty years later, the Dutch journalist Geert Mak followed in his tracks to see what had changed. Not with his dog but his wife, he traced the same giant circle: north through Vermont and New Hampshire, then out past the Great Lakes, through the Midwest, down the west coast and back through the Deep South. His book — brisk and direct on the page — mixes travelogue, history and reportage, and paints a picture of American decline. In Mars Hill, Maine, he chats with locals about the latest census figures, which show the bottom 20% earning only 3% of the money, and 11m on food stamps. He sees Detroit as a “post-modern Chernobyl”, and amid “oceans of maize” the small towns of Minnesota are “stone dead”. In California he derides the education system: in 2011 roughly half as much was spent on colleges as prisons. The States, he says, are like the divided Europe, complaining about Washington “as Europeans do about Brussels”. His trips through American turning-points – from the settlers to the Iraq war – make for a feeling of mission creep. They are often written to undercut American exceptionalism, and betray a pretty standard set of liberal European gripes. He’s at his best when giving a vivid view from the roads less travelled. As one man in Wisconsin says, “Nobody ever comes to this town!” ~ SIMON WILLIS Harvill Secker, November 20th

ILLUSTRATION KATHRYN RATHKE

Maggie Fergusson Six Good Books A shocking memoir of loss, an enlightening guide to money, and a moving novel from Marilynne Robinson MEMOIR The Iceberg by Marion Coutts, Atlantic, hardback, out now. The day Marion Coutts first took her son, Ev, to the childminder, her husband Tom was told he had a brain tumour. This fierce, pure memoir traces the two years between diagnosis and death. While Ev learns to speak, Tom’s grasp of language collapses. Phrases elude him. The letter P disappears. Then words crash away until he can no longer name his wife or son. Poleaxed by exhaustion, Marion lives in a “present continuous”, her thoughts chasing to and fro “like a dog on a tether”. Where does love lie in the brain? Will that too desert them? There’s no emotional incontinence here, no self-pity. Coutts writes with grace, precision and an awareness, even when near despair, that she, Ev and Tom are living something “strangely wonderful”. It’s shocking and instructive: an astonishing achievement. HISTORY Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Harvill Secker, hardback, out now. Reading this “brief [416-page] history of humankind” is like doing a strenuous workout: invigorating, but often acutely uncomfortable. Sweeping with impressive ease across nearly 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to the near future, Harari delights in upending cosy assumptions. We didn’t evolve smoothly from stooping apes to standing men. There were once at least six different homines, of which sapiens came out top. We triumphed not through brain or brawn, but our ability to believe, collectively, in fictional entities: religions, nation-states, limited-liability companies. Thus bonded, we became “the deadliest species in the annals of biology”, ecological serial killers wreaking cruel havoc on our fellow creatures, and on the planet. And in the next thousand years, Harari insists with disquieting confidence, we’ll oversee our own extinction. Homo not so sapiens, perhaps. FINANCE How to Speak Money by John Lanchester, Faber, hardback, out now. In autumn 2008, as billions were being wiped off the stockmarket, I found myself in a roomful of writers. “Where’s all the money gone?” asked one. Nervous laughter; no answer. As John Lanchester would say, we only “sorta-kinda” knew. His mission is to combat the baffled impotence most of us feel when bombarded by financial news; his method is carrot and stick. Economics affects us all, he insists; individually and collectively, we cannot afford to ignore it. But (the carrot) if you can master the lingo, it becomes commonsensical, and surprisingly entertaining. In Lanchester’s clear, companionable prose, the fog surrounding terms like quantitative easing and residential mortgage-backed securities evaporates. Emboldened, you embrace whole news concepts – plogs, bail-ins, fungibility. The effect is exhilarating. You can do it; this can help.

FICTION Lila by Marilynne Robinson, Virago, hardback, out Oct 9th. What’s so great about Marilynne Robinson? Her novels are few: this is her fourth in 35 years. They are uneventful, and unfashionably rooted in questions of faith. They return repeatedly to the same ageing minister, the Rev. John Ames, in his onehorse Iowa town, Gilead. But Gilead is the grain of sand through which Robinson explores eternity, and she does so in a quiet, ruminative style that takes over your heart as well as your head. Once you’ve fallen under her spell, she’s not just mesmerising but indispensable. You urge your friends to read her. Here, she turns to Ames’s young wife, Lila, an unwanted child rescued and raised by a rough-cut, itinerant saint. It’s a love story, unconventional and deeply moving. It’s also a reflection on suffering and joy; on the mystery that “life on Earth is difficult and grave, and marvellous.”

The Children Act by Ian McEwan, Cape, hardback, out now. Fiona Maye, a childless High Court judge working in the Family Division, has a razor-sharp mind, an unblemished reputation and a happy marriage. Her equilibrium seems steelplated. Then, simultaneously, her husband falls for a younger woman, and she’s called to adjudicate in the case of a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, Adam Henry, refusing medical treatment without which he’ll die. The twin challenges both break and make her. There are flaws here. The relationship between Fiona and Adam sometimes strains credulity. I longed for McEwan, so comfortable in the Mayes’ silk-dressinggowned world, to venture into the working-class Henrys’. But he pulls us convincingly into the mind of a 59-year-old woman as she wonders what her life has amounted to, and he does so in crisp prose that is, like Fiona’s, “almost ironic, almost warm”.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel, 4th Estate, hardback, out now. “Sorry to Disturb”, the first of these dark tales, might have lent its title to the whole collection. Story by story, Hilary Mantel leads us into apparently innocuous settings – a solicitors’ office in Wilmslow, a hotel in the East Midlands, a surgery in Harley Street (that street ending not in Marylebone Road but in “death and the place you were before you were born”) – only to reveal them crepitating with misery. As in “Wolf Hall”, she involves all five senses. In the Jeddah apartment where an expat wife falls prey to an unwelcome visitor, we hear the rattle of the air conditioning, smell the insecticide, feel the heavy coffin-lid doors. We become so inured to strangeness and shoals of ghosts that the final, title, story, in which an ira marksman waits to murder the prime minister, seems bland, almost tame. n

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VISUAL CV

Timothy Spall He’s an actor like no other – not even his actor son. And now he is winning awards for “Mr Turner”. Jasper Rees picks the very best of Mr Spall

1980 The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Spall the theatre tyro, star of the National Youth Theatre and top of his year at RADA, is now a distant memory. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s compendious epic, he set out his stall as a shape-shifter. As Young Wackford Squeers (far right), scion of the Yorkshire torture den Dotheboys Hall, he was a Humpty Dumptyish eruption of noisy, puerile cruelty; then, as Mr Folair, a chattering theatrical popinjay. The stage’s loss was to be the screen’s gain: Spall hasn’t done theatre since 1997. 1990 Life is Sweet The first of Spall’s four big-screen roles for Mike Leigh, to go with one in the theatre and a sixth on television. Leigh’s intense method of building character with his players yielded Aubrey, a sexually pent-up, jiggling bag of nerves in a Disney cap and moon specs, fired by a doomed ambition to be a refined restaurateur. “I’m not just a wanker,” explains the proprietor of The Regret Rien. “I’m a magician.” Veering between slapstick and pathos, Spall is matchlessly plausible in either guise. 1983-2004 Auf Wiedersehen, Pet ITV’s comedy-drama about British builders in Düsseldorf was about the many regional voices of working-class manhood. Spall’s first TV co-lead role was the calamitously boring Barry, a miserable twicedivorced Brummie. Few actors can make a debilitating want of charisma so intensely easy on eye and ear. When the BBC revived the series and took it to other hotspots, Barry was fatter, but his personality, like his Black Country accent, remained flat as a cap.

1999 Shooting the Past “Why the hell should you be interested in a chubby man wearing a cardie talking into a tape machine?” Because he is Spall, delivering much of a seductive performance straight to camera. After surviving leukaemia, Spall took on Stephen Poliakoff’s stagey BBC drama about a photographic library under threat. He is a shambling archivist, sticking it to big business. Big-eyed and bumptious, he hovers between madness and genius and embodies a precomputerised Britain, not ruling the waves but sinking beneath them.

culture

2001 Vacuuming Completely NUDE in Paradise Of Spall’s TV leads – from “Frank Stubbs Promotes” to his own documentary about going round Britain in a barge – this is the least celebrated and the best. Danny Boyle’s lo-fi digital detox after “The Beach” enters the weird, stricken world of a writer (Jim Cartwright). Spall is Tommy Rag, a sleazy, ruthless vacuum salesman who corrupts a dreamy trainee. Brimful of bravura, this is acting seen through the keyhole, distorted and terrifying. It confirmed Spall as England’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.

2005 Pierrepoint Who better to humanise the last hangman than the hangdog Spall? Albert Pierrepoint metronomically dispatched many Nazis at Nuremberg and, among hundreds of criminals, Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Spall wears a mask in the presence of the condemned until, tasked with hanging a man he knows from the pub, the master of repression cracks like a nut. A modest film, lifted by Spall, whose son Rafe was by now a fine actor too.

BBC, Photo Stage, Alamy, Rex, IDS/All Star

2009 The Damned United Archetypal Spall, giving stolid support to Michael Sheen’s mercurial turn as the gobby football maverick Brian Clough in the film of David Peace’s bestseller. Playing Clough’s long-suffering sidekick/punchbag Peter Taylor, he is the doughy but indispensable half of a very northern bromance.

2014 Mr Turner Mike Leigh’s loving portrait of beauty in ugliness is Spall’s finest hour yet, and not just because they said so at Cannes, where he was Best Actor. Rarely cast as an historical figure, Spall changed the record with his Churchill in “The King’s Speech”, reprised at the 2012 Olympics. But even that pales next to his J.M.W. Turner, a narrow-eyed sphinx spouting florid Latinisms and stuck-pig grunts. That blubbery bladder of a face scowls, smiles and leaks tears like nothing so much as a maritime canvas. It’s Timothy Squall. In the most poignant scene, Turner attempts a Purcell air. “Remember me,” he growls, “but forget my fate.” Fat chance, when his fate is to be both a character actor and a star.

Mr Turner opens in Britain Oct 31st

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PLACES PHOTOGRAPHS MARLON KRIEGER

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The old Caribbean

Dispatched to the Turks and Caicos as a reporter, Charles Laurence liked them so much he ended up buying a house there – and a boat The early sun peered over the headland as we left the harbour wall in our wake. Edwin stood at the bow, white shirt billowing in the breeze, bare feet planted on the deck of the Captain Haddock as she rose and fell in the swell, his back ramrod straight despite his 74 years. His eyes wrinkled as he squinted into the rollers breaking on the reef. “Keep steaming!” he cried. We had left Deane’s Dock under power from the outboard motor, planning to raise our sails beyond the headland to steer a starboard tack from Salt Cay to Grand Turk. The trade winds, which brought Christopher Columbus and Francis Drake through this passage five centuries ago, come from the east, and are deemed a “good breeze” by the island boatmen when blowing at 15 knots. But they are capricious, ready to gust to 20 knots or more, or die to a whisper, and on this morning of all mornings they had swung to the north-northeast, which is just where we wanted to go. As any old salt will testify, you can’t sail straight into the wind. The whitecaps met us at a gallop as soon as we left the shelter of the headland. They were frothing on top of six-foot waves, foam flying, crashing with plumes of spray onto the shallow reef jutting from the head. My how-to sailing book had suggested that if you see whitecaps, you stay in the harbour – but those rules don’t apply to men like Edwin. We motored on past the reef into the wind and the waves to raise the sails, the bow slicing nicely through the crests and on into the deep blue sea. I could glimpse Grand Turk on the horizon from atop the waves, a

strip of land seven miles away with a stubby white lighthouse on the western tip. It was a wild, wet ride. The life jackets stayed stowed, as they always do. In mid-channel, where the current that will carry you to Haiti runs strongest and the waves buck steepest, some rigging came loose and Edwin climbed barefoot onto the bow to tie it down. He stowed his cap and had to let go of his grip on the mast to use both hands. The Haddock heeled over to the gunwale. What was the drill for a man overboard? I hung onto the tiller with one hand, and used the other to coil a rope I could throw. Oh boy, I thought. And this is supposed to be fun. It all began 28 years ago with a call from the foreign editor, a man who liked to be gruff, when I was New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. “If you got your arse out of bed,” Nigel said, “you could get the 4pm flight from Miami to Grand Turk.” I was in Arizona. It was, if I remember, 4am. “Why”, I asked, “would I want to go to Grand Turk?” And where, for that matter, was Grand Turk? He chuckled. Our man who checked the night logs of Whitehall had spotted that the Foreign Office was preparing to declare direct rule over one of our remoter territories, and that the Royal Marine Commandos were on alert for military intervention. “Third Brigade,” said Nigel. “They did the Falklands war. You’d better be there.” I made the flight, heading south from Miami for 646 miles to the freckling of islands just off the southern tip of the Bahamas, learning about my >

PLACES

> destination as we drew nearer. Grand Turk is the

capital of the Turks and Caicos, still a British Overseas Territory, one of the last of the old pink dots on the globe. A half dozen or so of the islands are inhabited, the rest left to the birds and the iguanas and the Turk’s Head cactus. The beach close to the small airport has claims to be where Columbus first landed in 1492 after the long sail across the Atlantic. The plane came in at toe-paddling height, and landed with the scream of rubber and roar of engines in reverse thrust to stop just shy of the far shore. It was sunset. The breeze tossed the palms and the pines. There was one immigration officer, one customs man and one taxi, which took about three minutes to get from the airport to the Salt Raker Inn. A painted sign on the road read: “Tidy the Turks, Clean Up the Caicos”. This was the Cocaine Eighties, and Norman Saunders, the chief minister running the government under the apparently unwatchful eye of the British governor, had been arrested in a motel room in Miami by American drug-squad officers. It turned out that he had converted an old second-world-war airstrip on his home island of South Caicos into a refuelling stop for Colombian smugglers. The cargo would arrive in big Dakotas and be transferred onto small planes for the run to Florida. One plane that crashed into the sea is now a scuba-diving site; you can swim through the fuselage and watch the sharks glide sinuously by. The islands prospered for a while but things got out of hand when too many locals, already drawing attention by proffering $100 bills in the bars, began sampling the goods and going into the dealing business on their own accounts. Saunders did six years

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REPUBLIC Santiago

in an American jail before returning home and being re-elected to parliament to represent South Caicos. I checked into the Salt Raker and went for a walk around Cockburn Town, enchanted by the bougainvillea and cordia trees, the crystal sea lapping the beach on one side of the main street with rows of weathered houses with breezy verandahs on the other. I sat on a cannon, salvaged from hms Endymion when she went down on a reef in 1790, and the locals told me that what they really resented was having their man sold out to the Yanks. The governor, they thought, should have tipped Saunders off rather than agree to let him be filmed accepting $20,000 in a suitcase from an undercover cop in Miami. Perfidious Albion. The Salt Raker was busy with government pooh-bahs and lawyers who make a living setting up offshore companies. A craggy Englishman in bleached-out khakis wove his way to the bar. “I’m the Reuters correspondent,” he announced. “Anybody got a notebook and pencil I could borrow?” He was Colonel John Houseman, veteran of one too many exploits with Churchill’s Special Operations Executive during the war, a battered James Bond who quoted classical Greek over buckets of rum and was long retired; as I came to understand, the islands have a special allure to some of us who left home long ago and have little use for roots. Later that night he took me to the Junkanoo shebeen in Back Town. It was the old rebel hangout and still pounding to a reggae beat. We all laughed as Houseman told the story of how he had once N been kidnapped and held there in a dispute between the O People’s Democratic Movement and the governor. He L drunk his fill, andAleft when his captors fell asleep.

Old salt A view across the salt lakes to the White House

There was no need for the commandos in the event. The governor announced direct rule over the local radio, and Scotland Yard sent in two bobbies and a drug-squad officer to Clean Up the Caicos. For some reason, I felt utterly at home. For 20 years, amid and between two marriages, I came and went when I could, discovering Salt Cay when my son grew old enough to learn to scuba-dive, for it has a peerless diving school and unspoiled reefs. The Caribbean, professionally, is a New York corres pondent’s backyard, and over the years I wrote from Trinidad, Grenada, the Bahamas, St Martin, Haiti, Cuba and Montserrat, where a volcano and hurricane produced Hell and high water almost simultaneously. But nowhere was quite like the Turks and Caicos. While tourism boomed on Providenciales, which now looks more and more like Miami Beach, and on Parrot Cay, where the pirate queen Annie Bonny once wintered and which became famous as the island home of the likes of Keith Richards and Paul McCartney, on Grand Turk and Salt Cay – especially on Salt Cay – things stayed pretty much the same. This is the Old Caribbean, frayed and faded under tropical sun and ocean winds, tested by depopulation, but almost completely unspoiled. British adventurers came to the islands from Bermuda in 1684. They were scouring the ocean for low islands formed of porous limestone ridges, with natural salt-water lakes – salinas – at their centres; the salt these could produce was more precious than gold. They found Salt Cay, Grand Turk and South Caicos. At first they would sail in with a crew of slaves, rake the drying salt from the salinas,

and sail away again. In the 1700s, the Bermudans started building permanent settlements, digging canals and locks to turn the salinas into industrial salt ponds, which prospered for over two centuries. In the 1960s the bottom fell out of the Caribbean salt market and the salt owners turned loose their donkeys, which now survive wild and hardy in the desert scrub. Some islanders went to sea as merchant seamen or got in on the nascent tourist trade. Many left; the population of Salt Cay plummeted from 1,000 a century ago to just 60-odd today, the descendants of slaves who call themselves Belongers. One afternoon we piled into a golf cart and set off to explore Salt Cay. The island covers just two and a half square miles, about the size of Central Park, shaped like an arrowhead with the point facing south. We trundled the length of the lee shore, over the canal dug to bring fresh seawater into the saltpans, past the clump of wind-bent pines, past the canals and dykes, and the great plantation houses and the ruins of their salt works overlooking the sea where the sun sets. The Brown House, its main beams made of ships’ masts, has been restored by an American heiress; the White House is shabby now, but with its Bermudan stone-tiled roof and cavernous salt barn below Victorian rooms last decorated in the 19th century it is among the Caribbean’s most historic buildings. Beyond it we turned into a grid of dirt roads heading towards the open ocean, passing the cottages of South Settlement where grandmothers tended gardens of bougainvillea and the cordia “shade trees” which drop orange petals onto the pathways. The lane ended at the mangrove swamps and a rocky beach where the Atlantic crashes ashore. Just there was a grand old ruin of a house. “I’ve seen the house I am going to buy,” I announc ed when we got back to the Island Thyme Bistro. Empty and abandoned, shutters creaking, verandah overlooking the Atlantic to the east and the Caribbean to the west, it was the quintessential island house. “You can’t,” said Porter, our barkeep. “It belongs to the Queen of England. Anyway you can’t afford it.” “But you might be able to buy the old wooden house next door,” said Bram, a Salt Cay expat of 30 years who sat on the next stool to mine. They were both right. The big house had once been home to the district commissioner, a man in charge of raising taxes on the salt and the commander of a couple of cannon aimed at French raiders. Its >

A half dozen of the islands are inhabited, the rest left to the birds, the iguanas and the Turk’s Head cactus

Blistering barnacles The author (left) and Edwin Lightbourne aboard the Captain Haddock

PLACES

> smaller neighbour was for sale for $85,000. Debbie,

owner of the Coral Reef restaurant and the Salt Cay dive shop, runs an estate agency on the side. She took me to inspect it. “I call it the charming house,” she said. The name has stuck. Now it is my home for four months a year and I gaze from my own verandah at the ocean to the east and spot migrating whales going along the Columbus Passage to the west.

“It’s too quiet. The old folk are going. We’re needing some new work on the island”

One summer I found glasses rattling with excitement on Porter’s bar at the prospect of tourist development on Salt Cay. We would be rich. It was coming in the form of “Russians” who planned to build bungalows, condos and a hotel, along with a spa, golf course and a deep-water marina. They would cut Victoria Street in two so that yachts could sail into what were once salt beds. It was a remarkably secret proposal considering that it would cover 80% of the island, but we did find out that the plans included a branch of the Istrokapital Bank of Bratislava. In the era of oligarchs and offshore money, that explained a few things. The irony, I thought, as the New Caribbean comes crashing into the Old just as I plunder my savings for a

Sunday best Herbert Simmons and his granddaughters at St John’s, Salt Cay

home. The “Russians” turned out to be Czechs and Slovaks in a consortium called Salt Cay Devco. “It is time”, said Devco, “for Slovakia to have its own Caribbean paradise island.” The shimmer of sudden riches had its usual effect: unhappiness and bitter rivalry between those who stood to gain and those who didn’t. But it was not to be. Instead the islands found themselves in trouble once again: a Royal Commission of Inquiry under Sir Robin Auld found a strong enough stench of systemic corruption to call in the prosecutors. It looked as if Salt Cay was not the only island sold by the then prime minister, Michael Mis-

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ick, for his own gain and the gain of his cronies, but it turned out to be the deal that broke his back. Direct rule was once again imposed, and this time London sent in lawyers and forensic accountants rather than the drug squad. Devco has returned its Turks and Caicos acquisitions to the Crown, including our pristine North Beach, while protesting its innocence. Its principals face prosecution for corruption back in Prague. Misick, who married an American starlet after telling her that he owned a small Caribbean island, is facing trial after being extradited from Brazil. He is divorced. Salt Cay is quiet again. In season, there might be 50 or 60 expats and tourists; in summer, a handful. One Sunday I went down to St John’s for matins. Wilbur, a Haitian immigrant who worked on the restoration of my cottage, was in the churchyard ringing the single church bell. Poley, head of the Dickinson family whose son, Alan, is the captain of the ferry providing the link to the shops and services of Grand Turk, handed me a hymnal and prayer book. Herbert Simmons, like most of his generation a veteran of the British Merchant Navy, drove the church bus around the narrow lanes collecting the congregation of grandmothers who are the pillars of the community. But Miss Mellie and Miss Amy have gone, said Poley, gone into care in Grand Turk and Providenciales, and although neighbours are keeping up their cottage gardens, no one expects them back. Miss Rosie, who plays the church piano, would not be coming today because she had fallen and hurt her hand. “It’s quiet, man, it’s too quiet,” said Poley. “The old folk are going. We’re needing some new work on the island now the salt business is gone. A hotel on the beach, not too big, that would be good.” The pews were lightly filled that Sunday. Herbert brought his grandchildren, the three little girls lovely in their Sunday best, one of them minding the infant boy. Herbert’s wife, Miss Pat, who has Pat’s Place restaurant and is held to be the best at cooking local fish, went into the vestry and donned her surplice, keeping a stern eye on the grandchildren. Poley, Pat and her husband’s cousin Maurice, all lay preachers, made their way to the altar. There was no visiting Anglican minister that day. They made do without the piano, and sang the hymns with vigour. I had just bought the Charming House when I first spotted Edwin’s boats. There were two of them, moored in the half-ruined dock down by the old White House. Simple boats with sharp prows, they struck me as living history, and I wanted a bit of it. “Would you build a boat for me?” I asked Edwin.

He was the last of the island’s boat builders, fashioning sturdy little boats using handsaws and chisels and knowledge passed down through the generations. “No, man,” he said. “I’m old and don’t want to build no more boat.” Then Hurricane Ike blew by in 2008 and wrecked both of Edwin’s boats. Months later, I got a message back at home in New York that if I sent down materials for two, Edwin would build mine first. “Why”, I had asked when he’d finally agreed to build it, “don’t you fit your boats with sails? We could

Pink wings above American flamingos breed in the Turks and Caicos. below Towards the historic White House

sail to Grand Turk like they used to do.” Edwin had looked at me with a quizzical eye and said: “Boy, my first boat, we sailed straight over in one tack!” He raised his hand like a well-trimmed main sail and cut a perfect passage over the horizon. And instead of building the 16ft fishing skiff I had expected, Edwin built a 20-footer, the smallest of the old island sloops with genes going back 400 years, made to trade between the cays and run goods from the shore to bigger ships. Island time being what it is, the Captain Haddock, named for the character in the Tintin books and his love of adventure, slid into Deane’s Dock four years later, dazzling in her spanking fresh red and blue paint. She was christened with a beer bottle by the district commissioner, nowadays without plumed hat, and cheered by a good proportion of the islanders. By the end of last year we finally had a good rig fitted. (“More sail, more sail!” Edwin had admonished as I shipped selections of masts, booms, sails and ropes down to the island from the boatyards of New England.) We were ready for our maiden deep-water voyage across the jiving waves to Grand Turk. It felt like deliverance when we reached the shallows, waters that shimmer from topaz to azure, the colours of heaven in Renaissance frescoes. We docked at the Town Jetty under a noonday sun. Edwin beamed, his chest puffed out, as people clustered >

PLACES GOING NATIVE

When in...New Zealand Make the most of the great outdoors. Paul Whitfield on hiking, biking and star-gazing in the Southern Alps > around his handiwork; on these small islands every-

one knows of Edwin’s sailboat. I went to buy a cargo of wine at the Oddfellows’ Hall, between the sagging wooden structure of the Turks and Caicos Import Company, which once held monopolies on canned goods and fancy ribbons, and the Government Office where old ships’ cannon still point out to sea. Emancipation from slavery was declared on August 1st 1834, from the verandah above my local wine store, a detail that never fails to bring me joy. We waited out the heat and Edwin said: “It’s cool, man, you’ll see: the wind will drop and the sea will go down in the afternoon. We’ll have good sailing home.” He was right. We left the jetty elegantly under sail, with no need for the engine, tacked a little way east, then bore south to run before a wind which had now turned almost due north. The sea had calmed to a steady roll. When the wind dropped a little too low we used an oar to rig a boom for the jib to catch every puff, and made just enough way to beat the current heading for Haiti. We did not need to talk. We both knew we would make the passage by sail and save the gas so the Captain Haddock could meet her mission. It took three hours. The rigging creaked. About halfway, Salt Cay appeared like a mirage on the horizon, coming and going with the swell, as it would have done when the sea dogs of old had hunted the Spanish Main. Ratty, in “The Wind in the Willows”, tells Mole: “There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” We docked quietly, and went for a drink at the Coral Reef on the harbour, where a sign over the entrance reads: “I Love This Bar”. In the hot summer days since then, Edwin and I have turned the Haddock to repaint her bottom, and fitted a bigger, more powerful rudder. We have sailed up and down the lee shore fishing for tuna, but mostly catching barracuda. Lionel, the island’s commercial fisherman, ran out of gas for his motor and while he waited for his jerry cans from Grand Turk we took him around the point to North Beach for conch, the big ocean mollusc which has been an island staple since the first saltraker landed. We anchored off the beach, and Lionel dived without so much as a snorkel to pluck them off the sandy bottom 25 feet below. The breeze blows through the unglazed windows of the Old Caribbean, keeping us cool. The waves should calm again after the full moon. Edwin and I are planning a voyage south, to Great Sand Cay, where the only inhabitants are birds and lizards, and the nurse sharks congregate off the beach in breeding season. “Good sailing,” Edwin says. “Good sailing.” ■

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DON’T be surprised if you’re asked your opinion on the country when you’ve barely left the airport. New Zealanders love to be loved.

DO go beyond Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Try Waiheke Island for Bordeaux, Hawke’s Bay for Syrah and Central Otago for Pinot Noir.

DO hongi any Maori who host you. The simultaneous pressing of forehead and nose intermingles the “breath of life”.

DON’T restrict yourself to beard-andGore-tex tramping. On the three-day Queen Charlotte Track water-taxis carry your bags between lodges that are as luxurious as you can afford.

DON’T rely on trains. Miss Monday’s 7.50am from Auckland to Wellington and you’ll have to wait three days for the next one. DO try the roast beetroot and feta tart at Little and Friday, a stellar café/ bakery in a nondescript strip mall in the nondescript Auckland suburb of Belmont. Just turn right at Takapuna Grammar, where the pop star Lorde may still be a student. DO seek out low-key Matapouri. Its golden beach is one of Northland’s finest, and a sandy track through the dunes leads to Whale Bay, an almostprivate beach frequented by dolphins. DO hit the free hot-spring trail. Wallow in a hollow at Coromandel’s Hot Water Beach, massage your shoulders under the warm waterfall at Rotorua’s Kerosene Creek, gently poach in Taupo’s Spa Park and hike to the steaming lake at Welcome Flat. DON’T miss the Water Whirler, Len Lye’s kinetic sculpture on the waterfront at Wellington. DON’T write off a winter visit to the South Island. The wet West Coast often puts on clear days perfect for chopper flights onto the glaciers. This is the only time of year you can mountain bike the wonderful Heaphy Track, and the skifields are cranking.

DO look beyond bungy jumping. Your adventure dollars stretch further canyoning through Wanaka’s Deep Canyon, rafting over a seven-metre waterfall on Rotorua’s Kaituna River or jet-boating the Wairaurahiri River. DO visit earthquake-ravaged Christchurch. A new city is rising from the rubble and in neighbouring Lyttelton artists, musicians and smallscale developers are forging a port town even more vibrant than before. DON’T expect to see a kiwi in the wild, though at Stewart Island’s Mason Bay these normally nocturnal birds even come out during the day. DO get starstruck on a night tour of Mount John observatory at Lake Tekapo. The southern firmament is set against the Southern Alps in the heart of the Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky Reserve. DO dine at Fleur’s Place, a shack perched on the wharf in Moeraki. Fleur has her own boat to bring in the freshest fish. This is also the best chance to try muttonbird, a Maori delicacy a fellow diner described as tasting like “anchovy duck”. DON’T get a moko. A full-face Maori tattoo may not seem such a good idea on your first day back in the office.

ILLUSTRATION NEIL GOWER

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cartophilia

To infinity... A 3D map of space provides a new understanding of how the heavens unfolded

We are all familiar with maps of the globe, as though seen from space, unfolded onto a flat page with America on the left and China on the right. This map, with its glowing web of blobs and veins like so many city lights at night, shows space seen from Earth similarly unfolded. But unlike those two-dimensional maps, this one allows us to see in three dimensions: up and down, left and right, and then out through the universe. It’s a map of galaxies, bundled into clusters and superclusters. The haze running through the middle is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. At the top is a bright density of blue – the Coma Cluster, which contains 1,000 galaxies. Below it there’s a purple patch called the Virgo Cluster. The purple is important. The galaxies are coloured according to their distance from us: the purple bits are closest, the red farthest away. But they are all in what astronomers, with their vertiginous sense of scale, call the “local universe” – which stretches for 380m light years. It was published in 2011, the result of a project led by John Huchra, who until his death in 2010 was a professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. “The idea”, says Professor Robert Kirshner, his friend and colleague, “was that while it’s easy to map the two-dimensional position of something on the sky – how far east, west, north or south it is – finding its distance from us is much harder. But once you find out where something is, you’re on the trail to knowing how it

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got there.” Since the 1970s Huchra had been calculating the distances of galaxies using a phenomenon called redshift, discovered in the 1920s by Edwin Hubble, who found that when light is emitted by a moving object, its wavelength changes. If the object is moving towards you the light shifts to the blue end of the spectrum; farther away it shifts to the red end. Hubble saw that light from almost every galaxy is redshifted. Then he found something else: “Hubble’s really big discovery”, Kirshner says, “was that the velocities of those galaxies and their distances from us were proportional. By itself that’s astonishing, the story of an expanding universe. But as a practical matter, by measuring the wavelength of the light you get a number that’s proportional to the distance. And that tells you which ones are nearby and which are far away.” That proportion is called the Hubble Constant. When Huchra and his colleagues began measuring the

places

T. Jarrett (IPAC/Caltech)

...and beyond

redshifts of galaxies, they found extraordinary cosmic structures. Mapping the northern sky in the 1980s, they found a wall of galaxies 500m light years long, 200m light years wide and 16m light years thick. Called the Great Wall, it‘s been likened to a giant cosmic duvet. They saw voids between clusters of galaxies hundreds of millions of light years across. They began to see that the universe is clumpy rather than smooth, and that galaxies are strung out on filaments – “like the bubbles in a soap dish”, Kirshner says – and that the best theories of how the universe was formed couldn’t account for what they were seeing. While those earlier maps had been of portions of the sky, in 2005 work began on this map of the entire local universe. The first step was a 2D map of the sky, but there was one thing blocking the view: our own galaxy. The Milky Way is full of dust, which obscures large parts of the cosmos and creates what astronomers call the “Zone of Avoidance”.

To get round that problem, the astronomers worked in infra-red. “In the infra-red, the dust from our galaxy is easier to see through,” says Karen Masters, who worked with Huchra. Then they added redshift measurements to give the map its third dimension. “One of the big advantages of this map”, Masters says, “is that it reveals structures that, because we’re embedded in them, are difficult to see by looking in any one direction. Wherever there’s a very large concentration of galaxies, all the galaxies round it move towards that point. And it seems like the biggest concentration in our part of the universe is just behind the Zone of Avoidance.” In other words, it helps to show us where the Milky Way is going. So how did the universe come to look like this? The answer appears to be hiding in plain sight. “Clusters of galaxies seem to be held together by gravity,” Masters says. “But we know they couldn’t be held together by their own gravity, by the gravity of the stars within them. We know there’s a material out there which we can’t see but which has gravity: dark matter. It’s easy to simulate on a computer, and if you make simulations of dark matter and what it does to the universe, you end up with structures that look a lot like what you see here. So this is the current thinking: that the galaxies you’re looking at are just lighting up the underlying field of dark matter.” ~ Simon Willis

SEVEN WONDERS

Christopher Le Brun The youngest president of the Royal Academy since Lord Leighton in 1878, Christopher Le Brun is a sculptor, printmaker and painter. He says he doesn’t paint what he sees, he paints what he thinks – but his favourite places show an eye for beauty as well as a taste for symbolism Beach Hayling Island, Hampshire When I was a child, my mother and I used to walk down to Southsea Beach almost every summer morning. Behind us was Eastney Barracks, where my father was based. And in front was Hayling Island – and its lovely whitesand beach, backed by dunes. Going there was always a sort of dream of mine. You had to get an open-top bus (the essence of adventure) down to a little ferry, which crossed a dangerous tidal race. Every year people drowned swimming there. So the beach had this very strong atmosphere: it was this place of romance, but the journey there was treacherous. It was a weird combination.

City Rome I recently had an exhibition in Rome with the artist Enzo Cucchi. It reminded me of how Rome has meant a lot to my work as a painter. It’s one of the few cities that are both a place and a symbol. So on the one hand, it is a monument to Western art; you can’t be there without appreciating that this is where Raphael lived, or where St Paul was imprisoned. (Interestingly, “Roma” is a palindrome of “amor”, so even the city’s name has this monumental quality.) But at the same time, my friend Cucchi can leave his studio, go next door to the old Italian restaurant and be fondly greeted as “maestro”. So Rome is like a village, but it’s also a great world symbol.

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Building My south London home In the 1980s, my wife and I left east London (where we lived next to a brothel) and went south of the river. We found this villa in Camberwell – where, we were told, Ruskin’s secretary had lived – and we’ve been there ever since. It feels like the sort of house a child might draw. The roses in the front were planted by us; two of my children were born there. It proves it’s possible to be in the centre of London and still live in a house with a garden filled with fruit trees and flowers. I can’t imagine this in Paris, Berlin or Tokyo.

PLACES

Richard Long’s “Inland Sea Driftwood Circle” and “River Avon Mud Circles by the Inland Sea” by Tadasu Yamamoto, 4 Corners, Mike Walker Pictures, Bridgeman, Alamy, Bruce Yuanyue Bi

Journey from Beijing to Yining In 2010, my son Edmund went on his gap year to Yining, in the province of Xinjiang. My wife and I were worried; Edmund was one of only two Europeans in the city and there’d been tremendous unrest in the region. After eight months, we decided to check up on him. We flew to Beijing and got on a train. Our journey inland was really exciting: from our cabin we saw tiny villages, where every little patch had been cultivated, and passed vast deserts where huge dust storms turned the sky black. Eventually we got to Xinjiang. By that time, Edmund could speak rudimentary Mandarin. With him, we ended up travelling to Yining by an overnight coach. It was this mad bus full of chickens, geese and dogs. Work of art Pierrot (formerly known as Gilles), by Jean-Antoine Watteau Stylistically, my work is very different from Watteau’s, but “Gilles” somehow represents what I feel about painting. It is curious, enigmatic: the man portrayed is an actor so you don’t know whether you’re looking at him or the character he’s playing. The painting’s status is odd – it may have been commissioned to advertise the players’ company – but I think the status of all paintings is odd. What do they do? Watteau’s work, full of fantasy and imagination, acknowledges the artificial character of painting: it’s not a document, it’s not necessarily about truth. The point of painting is pleasure and mystery. It satisfies metaphysical questions about life.

Hotel Benesse, Japan On the Japanese island of Naoshima there is a sort of art museum-hotel called the Benesse. It is the most exquisite place; there is a spiritual quality to it. Designed by Tadao Ando, a boxer turned architect, the hotel is simple, clear, absolutely modern. Each room has a different sense of space and light. It’s like being in an art installation: everything has been considered – the doors, the floor, the wood. And Benesse is full of works by artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Richard Long, Jasper Johns, Hockney.

Christopher Le Brun was talking to Charlie McCann

View Portsmouth Harbour When I was ten, there was an art competition at school. We were taken to the top of Portsdown Hill in Portsmouth, and we each did a painting of the view. It was an extraordinary scene: you could see Portsmouth’s little terraced houses, Portchester Castle, the boats in the harbour, the islands in the distance. My painting won the competition, and went on tour – rumour had it, to Japan. Anyway, I’ve never seen it again. In a way, though, that painting, and that view, set me on my path. n

where the wild things are

High society In the Roof of Africa lives a most atypical monkey. Henry Wismayer rises at dawn to study the second-most political of primates

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PLaces

The sun is still a smear on the horizon as I hurry to beat the dawn, slaloming through an army of giant lobelia, over grassy tussocks still spongy from last night’s rain. I awoke feeling groggy – out in the open, at 15,000 feet, sleep comes fitfully – but the weariness is soon replaced by keen expectation. The creature I’m pursuing is most active in the morning and my reward comes quickly: a chorus of chirrups drifting down the tableland from the north. They call this place the Roof of Africa. I’m in the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia, a World Heritage site. The earth beneath my feet began its journey skyward 70m years ago, when lava bubbled up from volcanic fissures in the Horn of Africa. Over time the lava solidified, layer on layer, until it had formed a giant hemisphere of basalt, three miles thick. When the flow slid to a halt, glaciers gnawed at its edges to form cliffs and rain seeping into cracks carved yawning canyons. Elevated and isolated, the creatures here evolved to fit their surroundings. In a charismatic cast of animals – scimitar-horned walia ibex, flame-furred simian wolves – the character now appearing in a shadow play of frolicking silhouettes on a nearby ridge is king. The gelada, Theropithecus gelada, is a most atypical monkey. Descendant of a primate that once patrolled grasslands from South Africa and Spain, it is now confined to the soaring crags of northern Ethiopia. As I watch the gelada up here, it is difficult to imagine them anywhere else. The crowd gathering – first five, then a dozen, now 20 or so figures, framed against the early haze – has spent the night on the cliff-face ledges of escarpments reaching up to a mile high. At the break of day, they clambered onto the plateau to feed and play. About two feet tall, with flowing tawny fur and a black, puckered jaw, the gelada is the only monkey to subsist almost entirely on grass. With the dexterity and concentration of a watchmaker, their

nimble fingers can harvest 150 blades of grass every minute. As they spend so much of the day shuffling around on their backsides, the sexual display organs that usually adorn a monkey’s nether regions have migrated to the chest. It’s this distinctive marking, an hourglass patch of crimson skin, that gives rise to the gelada’s common misnomer: the bleeding-heart baboon. Their communal structure is complex. The basic social unit is the harem: a group of females and young, ruled by an alpha male with leonine fangs and a rock-star mane. Other bands consist of bachelor males, pretenders to the alpha males’ throne. The resulting intrigue – bachelor bands conspiring to unseat their dominant rivals – would befit the medieval courts of Ethiopia’s Solomonic emperors. More often, however, the gelada are a cohesive bunch. While harems commonly number a few dozen, by day they frequently converge to form much larger herds, up to 800 strong. Of all primates, only humans are more terrestrial and more political. Emboldened by the strength that comes with such numbers, the gelada tend to have fraught relations with the locals. The Ethiopian boy-herders carry slingshots to fend off raids by gelada special forces on their wheat fields. Here they are protected, and seldom shy with humans. Yet it still comes as a surprise when this troop heads straight for me. Scampering across the frosty tundra, tails raised, a band of about 50 descends the steppe, preceded by the non-stop symphony of hums, chirrups and squeaks – a chatter of over 30 distinctive sounds – that binds the harems together. For 20 minutes they linger, so engrossed in the morning routine of grazing and grooming that I’m hardly worth a second glance. For the outsider, sitting among a gelada herd is one of the most wonderful animal encounters imaginable; few beasts provide the opportunity for such prolonged proximity – until, at some invisible signal, they rise as one, and move off towards the pink sunrise. n

photograph Timothy Allen

Landscapes of the mind

A magnificent magic carpet Modern oceanography divides the deep sea into three zones: the bathyal, the abyssal and the hadal. What a cadence those terms form – each more profound than the last. The farther down we go, the less we know: the floor of the Marianas Trench has been less studied than the surface of Mars. “What passes in those remote depths…we can scarcely conjecture,” wrote Jules Verne with relish in 1870 – conscious that where science had been unable to reach, fantasy could prosper. I went, as a boy, through a sea-monster phase. Maybe we all do. It took me to H.P. Lovecraft’s octopoid god of evil, the Dread Cthulhu. It took me to the tentacled Kraken of Tennyson’s poem, that sleeps “far beneath in the abysmal sea”, among “enormous polypi” and “huge sponges of millennial growth”, waiting for the time when he will rise “roaring” to the surface. And of course it took me down 20,000 leagues with Captain Nemo and his crew of black-clad outcasts aboard the submarine Nautilus, to see narwals, orcas and the mega-squid, “poulps”. Rereading Verne’s book, I’m reminded of how drastically it fails as a novel (scant plot, absurd ending), and how magnificently it succeeds as a magic-carpet ride. “You are going to visit the land of marvels,” Nemo promises our narrator, Pierre Aronnax – and he does. Verne has achieved contemporary cool as the father of modern steampunk. Bunsen lanterns, copper aqualungs, guns that fire “glass globes supercharged with electricity”, riveted iron that can withstand million-pound pressures: his writing crackles with the geek-thrill of early technology. But the true wonders of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” are natural. There are scenes that have stayed with me: the Nautilus reaching the South Pole, where it is caught and nearly crushed in a white tomb of ice; Nemo and Aronnax making their

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night ascent of an Atlantic volcano, passing through seaweed jungles from which shine the eyes of “giant lobsters” and “titanic crabs”, until they reach the crater as it plumes bright lava into the black water. Most amazing – and least plausible – is when the Nautilus noses its way through the tunnel that Verne imagines joining the Red Sea and Mediterranean, miles below the shimmering Sinai. Each chapter also contains Aronnax’s loving lists of the organisms he sees through the glass viewing-windows of the Nautilus: the “pearl-oysters” and the “wolfthorn-tails”, the “medusae” and the slow-growing “blood coral”. He is a classic 19th-century naturalist: spellbound by the beauty of species, but unbothered by the slaughter of single creatures. He and Nemo are quite happy to tuck into dinners from a conservationist’s nightmare: “turtle soup made of the most delicate hawksbills”, “fillets of the emperorholocanthus”. They hunt sea-otters, and shoot dead low-flying albatrosses from beneath the waves. Ned, the Canadian harpoonist, yearns to impale every cetacean he sees. Two visions of the oceans compete in Verne’s novel. On the one hand, they are so vast as to be invulnerable – what Nemo calls “The Living Infinite”. On the other, Verne senses their future fragility – and that a time may come when their “creative power” might be less than “man’s instinct for destruction”. Nemo refuses to kill except to meet needs; Aronnax prophesies that the “barbarous and inconsiderate greed” of humans will “one day cause the disappearance of the last whale in the ocean”. A century and a half later, and Verne’s fears have been proved broadly right. As water warms, coral reefs bleach, over-fishing rises and marine biodiversity declines, the upper realms of the sea no longer seem secure. Way down in the hadal zone, though, the ocean still goes about its chilly business – and the Kraken waits. n ILLUSTRATION Su blackwell

colin crisford

Never mind the plot – Jules Verne’s vision of the deep still delights Robert Macfarlane

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